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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



Life Indeed 



Life Indeed 



BY 

Edward B; Coe 

D.D., LL.D. 

Senior Minister of the Collegiate Church 
New York 



That they may lay hold on the life which is life 
indeed. — i Tim. vi. 19, r. v. 




New York Chicago Toronto 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

Publishers of Evangelical Literature 

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Copyright, 1899 

by. 

FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 




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To my Friends in the Fifth Avenue Collegiate 
Church who have desired that this volume should 
be printed, it is affectionately dedicated, with the 
hope that others who read it may he led to ** lay 
hold on the life which is life indeed.'" 



Contents 



I. 


A Lost Faith . . . . 


9 


II. 


De Profundis 


29 


III. 


God Wrestling with Man . 


45 


IV. 


The Restoring of Souls 


63 


V. 


The Work of God 


81 


VI. 


Putting on Christ 


lOI 


VII. 


The Practical Man's Mistakes . 


121 


VIII. 


Divine Restraints 


141 


IX. 


In the Footsteps of Jesus. . 


161 


X. 


Jesus Asleep .... 


179 


XI. 


The Leadership of Little Chil- 






dren 


201 


XII. 


The Necessity of Immortality 


227 


XIII. 


The Place and the Way 


249 



A LOST FAITH 



They have taken away my Lord, and I know 
not where they have laid Him, — John xx. 13. 



A LOST FAITH 

The first Easter morning brought to this poor 
woman a sore disappointment. She had gone in 
the early twilight to the grave where two days be- 
fore the body of one whom she had loved had been 
hurriedly and secretly buried. Her visit could of 
course do Him no good, for He was dead. But 
she might at least, with the spices that she carried, 
complete the hurried embalming, which the ap- 
proach of the Jewish Sabbath had perhaps inter- 
rupted. She might, at any rate, sit near Him a 
little longer, before she must give Him up forever, 
and offer to Him the affectionate tribute and to her 
own heart the great relief of her tender thoughts 
and her silent tears. The almost irresistible im- 
pulse, which leads us to cling, to the very last, to 
those whom we love, though death has touched 
them, drew her even to the tomb of Him whom she 
called her Lord. 

It was no ordinary friendship which had bound 
her to Him. We know but little of her history and 
we may hesitate to accept as true all that is told us 
of Him. But there is no doubt whatever of the 
opinion concerning Him or of the feeling toward 
Him, which prevailed in the little group of persons 
11 



12 Life Indeed 

to which she belonged. She doubtless believed, as 
others did, certainly, that He had cured her by 
direct, supernatural power, of a peculiarly dreadful 
disease. She had been more or less in His com- 
pany from that time to this. She appears to have 
stood in intimate relations with His mother, and 
with the mother of two of His disciples. She had 
seen Him perform what appeared to her to be 
miraculous acts of divine power. She had heard 
from Him words which seemed to her to be words 
of divine authority and wisdom. She had felt, in 
personal acquaintance, the force of a character 
which was to her the very ideal of divine purity 
and strength and gentleness and love. We some- 
times turn the ancient and fragmentary pages, 
which tell us all we know about Him, and are 
strangely impressed by the spiritual depth of His 
sayings and the spiritual beauty of His life. But 
whatever He was, this woman from the little fishing 
town of Magdala had known Him well, and she 
believed that He was the long-expected deliverer 
of her people, the promised Messiah, the Christ of 
God. She may have been wrong in this, but this 
v/as her belief. She may have had but an imper- 
fect conception of what He meant by His language 
concerning Himself; she obviously did not under- 
stand Him to have foretold His resurrection ; but 
He was to her a superior being, who had brought 
into her obscure and sinful life the glory of another 
world. 



A Lost Faith 13 

Judge, then, of the utter desolation of sorrow 
with which on reaching the sepulchre she found it 
empty. Was it that then for the first time she 
realized that she had lost Him ? Not so, for two 
days before she had seen Him die. She had stood, 
with the few faithful and loving ones, near the cross 
on which He had expired. She had looked, to the 
very end, for some signal display of the power 
which she believed Him to possess, for a triumphal 
vindication of the claims which she knew Him to 
have made. But no help had come from earth or 
heaven. She had heard His dying cry, and when 
at last He was taken down from the cross, she saw 
only too plainly that His life was extinct. She had 
witnessed His burial, and then, as she sat and 
watched, while the darkness deepened, before His 
closed and silent tomb, the terrible certainty had 
sunk into her soul that all was over. Then it 
was that she knew that He was gone from her, and 
that she should never see Him alive again. And 
long before the hours of the Sabbath had passed 
and it began to dawn toward the first day of the 
week, every ray of hope had faded and left her in 
the stupor of inconsolable grief. 

It was not, then, a deeper sense of her irreparable 
loss, which called out a new flood of passionate 
tears, as she came to the sepulchre and found it 
untenanted. But she cherished even the lifeless 
form from which she could not bear to part. It 
was that over which she had gone to weep ; it was 



14 Life Indeed 

the loss of that only that had wrung from her the 
cry, ^'They have taken away my Lord/' Surely 
in His tomb He could have done no harm. They 
might at least have left Him to her there. And so 
she stood disconsolate, in the cold Easter dawn. 

So many a human soul has stood by the grave 
of a dead faith. It was once a living faith, and 
full of the joy and beauty and strength of life. It 
was, perhaps, a faith in some man, upon whose 
knowledge and judgment you had thought you 
could depend. He seemed to you to possess ample 
sources of information, and the industry and in- 
telligence to use them wisely. You felt sure that 
his opinions were not hastily formed, nor distorted 
by prejudice, not colored by selfishness. He was 
a man, you supposed, of acute observation, of wide 
experience; and you received his advice as the 
final settlement of the questions that troubled you. 
But you find, as you go on, that he is far from in- 
fallible. You buy a security that he recommends, 
and it tumbles to nothing ; you put your property 
in his hands, and it slips through his fingers ; you 
adopt a course of study or of action to which he 
has counseled you, and you find, perhaps too late, 
that your prospects for life are endangered or 
ruined. He meant well, you say, if you are just to 
him ; you perhaps love him still for the services he 
once did you and for his kindly intentions, but you 
sadly own that you no longer believe in him as a 
clear-sighted and cautious adviser. 



A Lost Faith 15 

You have, perhaps, had a friend in whose affec- 
tion you trusted. You grew up together, were 
together at school or at college, passed together 
through many trying vicissitudes of life, and you 
always found him staunch and true. You felt sure 
that you could count on him, whatever might 
happen; your friendship for each other could 
never grow cold. But little by little you drift 
apart, your courses in life take different directions ; 
other friends gather round him and you are left on 
the rim of an ever-widening circle; till you are 
forced at last to admit that his special friendship 
for you is dead. You do not think of blaming 
him for this. You rally from it, perhaps, and go 
bravely and cheerfully on with your work, but you 
bear about for a time a dull pain in your heart, or 
you carry the scar of wounded feeling forever. It 
is an experience which comes usually more than 
once in a lifetime, but it is a sad thing for a man to 
lose faith in a friend. 

Or you have trusted some one for his character, 
which seemed to you as solid as the hills. His 
very look inspired confidence, his name was held 
as a synonym of honor, his simple presence rebuked 
hypocrisy and fraud. Men whom you knew to be 
low and mean instinctively avoided him, and he 
stood in the community as the type of a pure and 
upright man. He stands so still, but you cannot 
trust him as you did. Ugly stories are whispered 
about his business transactions. Dark facts have 



16 Life Indeed 

come to your knowledge, which throw doubt on 
his integrity. You look for more complete dis- 
closures which will change your doubts into cer- 
tainties and ruin his name. But you, meanwhile, 
have lost your faith in him. Well for you, if you 
have not also lost your faith in virtue, truth, and 
human nature itself ! 

Or perhaps you have given your sympathy and 
aid to an enterprise which seemed to you worthy 
of all confidence and honor. It was full of the 
promise of beneficent and enduring results. It 
was just what was needed to accomplish a great 
and desirable end. And so you flung yourself 
heartily into it, with all the enthusiasm of your 
nature, and you felt the exhilarating reaction which 
comes from honest devotion to a noble cause. But 
the effects that you expected do not appear. The 
evils that you hoped to destroy still exist ; the co- 
operation of others is withdrawn ; public sympathy 
deserts you ; and you come at last to the sad con- 
clusion that the scheme from which you had antici- 
pated so much is a failure. Nay, perhaps as your 
faith in it dies away, you lose confidence in all at- 
tempts to bring about any important and general 
improvement in society. You settle down into the 
gloomy conviction that events may as well be left 
to take their course, that an enthusiasm of human- 
ity is a will-o'-the-wisp. 

Or it may be a religious faith that you are at 
length about to bury. It was dear to you once. 



A Lost Faith 17 

It is bound up with memories of your home and 
your childhood. You learned its sacred names at 
your mother's knee. Those whom you have most 
loved and honored have lived and died in it, and 
it gave them a courage and gentleness and patience 
and purity which made their lives beautiful, a joy 
and trust and serenity of spirit which made their 
death triumphant. You have seen it held, in va- 
rious degrees of intelligent comprehension and of 
moral earnestness, by multitudes around you. On 
some it has seemed to exert no influence whatever. 
It has been to others the very breath of a diviner 
life. It has lifted the fallen to a new manhood and 
womanhood. It has inspired the strong to a self- 
denying activity. It has held men true under the 
shock of a great temptation. It has kept them 
calm and cheerful under blow after blow of calam- 
ity. You have observed the fruits of it, not only 
in individual characters which it has renewed or 
developed, but in organized effort for the relief of 
the suffering, for the rescue of the ruined, for the 
spread of the principles and the practice of right- 
eousness. To these great undertakings you have 
seen men giving their fortunes and their lives, not 
for any personal advantage, but from devotion to 
that faith, which till lately was yours, and you 
have instinctively honored them for their loyalty to 
it. You have looked over history and have no- 
ticed that from the first these have been its effects. 
It has, indeed, often been misunderstood, its hold 



18 Life Indeed 

on human nature has never yet been complete, and 
many a crime has been committed in its name. 
But it has been at least one of the principal agen- 
cies in refining and purifying human society. And 
the more thoroughly any community has been gov- 
erned by its principles and animated by its spirit, 
the more conspicuous has been its peace and prog- 
ress and virtue. 

You may even have had experience in yourself 
of its beneficent power. You have sometimes suf- 
fered a keen sense of sin, as you have compared 
your own conduct with your consciousness of duty 
and your ideal of character, and you have felt a 
great load lifted from your conscience as your re- 
ligion has shown you a God of love, ready to for- 
give you for the sake of an atoning Redeemer. 
You have longed for communion with the infinite 
Father, and you have seemed to draw near to Him 
in the person of one whom you believed to be His 
Son. You now think that such communion was 
all a delusion and a fancy, but it had the same 
effect upon you in satisfying your highest aspira- 
tions and exalting all your spiritual life, as if it had 
been real. You have been attracted to Him, 
through whom you have thus come nearer to God, 
not as a man of superior intelligence and virtue, 
in spite of an unaccountable hallucination under 
which He labored, but as the very Word made 
flesh, the divine mind and character realized in 
humanity. He not only revealed to you the infi- 



A Lost Faith 19 

nite love, He bound you by a loving devotion to 
Himself. He lifted you toward all that is noblest 
and best. You felt that it was your privilege and 
your glory to serve Him. Duty was transfigured 
when it became the offering of gratitude to Him. 
Sorrow was lightened when you thought of His ten- 
der personal care. The discipline of life through 
which you were passing acquired a solemn but joy- 
ful meaning, when you looked forward to the home, 
wherein, if you were faithful, you should one day 
see His face. Your whole moral nature was broad- 
ened and purified by this Christian faith which 
once you held. You were eager to proclaim it, 
you sought to win others to the acceptance of it. 
It was the ground of your deepest hopes ; it was 
the inspiration of your highest activity. 

But now, you say, you have *^ given it up.** It 
is dead already, and it waits to be buried. Per- 
haps it is costing you something to part with it. 
Your whole nature has been wrung and torn in the 
conflict of reason and feeling through which you 
have passed. You can mark the precise instant at 
which your struggling faith in the gospel expired. 
Perhaps, on the other hand, you do not know what 
has killed it. Its doctrines have one by one lost 
their hold upon you. Its threatenings have some- 
how ceased to alarm you as they did. Its promises 
have year by year grown less alluring to your heart. 
Other motives of action have displaced those 
which it offers, and these have seemed more and 



20 Life Indeed 

more remote and unreal. The decay of your faith 
has been a half conscious and gradual process, and 
you have only awakened to a knowledge of it when 
it is already too late, as you think, — when the evil, 
if evil there is, is done. 

For it often occurs that our religious beliefs are 
insensibly altered as the result of simple indif- 
ference. They may not have been seriously weighed 
at the outset, they may have been accepted by tra- 
dition as a matter of course, they may have been 
eagerly embraced in a moment of excitement; or 
even if maturely and deliberately accepted, they 
may never have gained any firm hold upon the 
mind or become the real basis of character. And 
from simple neglect they are swept away, one by 
one, in the rush of an eventful and eager life, by 
other interests that absorb the thought. If they 
are nothing more than mere intellectual convictions, 
this will be true of them. You may give your 
thorough adherence, at twenty years of age, to the 
principles of a political party, and never think of 
them again until you are forty, and what is your 
old political faith worth to you then ? If your re- 
ligion meant to you certain motives of conduct and 
certain currents of affection, it is truer still. For a 
motive that is seldom heeded soon ceases to be a 
motive, and love will quickly die if you pay no at- 
tention to it. But if that which is claimed for the 
Christian religion is true, if it is something more 
than a system of beliefs and a condition of devout 



A Lost Faith 21 

and trustful feeling, if it does really bring the 
human soul into communion with God, so that He 
makes His nearness felt, His truth clear, His love 
a sweet and sacred possession to those who seek 
Him through Jesus Christ, — if that is what is meant 
by a Christian faith, then you surely need not won- 
der that it has lost its reality if you have lived in 
disregard of it. That kind of religion, if it is pos- 
sible to men, is possible only to those who are in- 
tent upon it. And if yours was not that, it was 
not a religion at all, and you might as well let it 
go. You never have known what a religion is. It 
is not an opinion or a score of opinions ; it is not 
an emotion or a series of emotions. It is drawing 
near and keeping near to God, in reverent adora- 
tion, in humble contrition, in childlike trust, in 
holy obedience, in free and peaceful and glad com- 
munion. If you have given up your religion, it is 
possible you never had one, or if you have once 
possessed it, you may have simply let it die. It 
matters little to you or to any one else whether you 
believe certain things or not, if you stop with be- 
lieving them ; it matters very much, if you act on 
your convictions. But convictions are not always 
wrought by arguments, they are worn into the mind 
by experience also. And religious convictions, 
above all others, are the fruit of experience as well 
as of inquiry. If your faith was only a belief, you 
may have lost it by neglect. If it was the begin- 
ning of a new life, it may have been smothered 



22 Life Indeed 

or trampled upon, with all its promise of an 
ever unfolding" and deepening evidence of its 
own divine origin, in the hot pursuit of other 
things. 

Or it may be that on the other hand the very in- 
tensity with which you have embraced and tried to 
practice some of the principles of Christianity, has 
ultimately led to your abandonment of them all. 
You took, for instance, the view which the Bible 
gives of sin, and you believed it. You looked 
abroad upon society, you looked within upon your 
own heart, and you found it confirmed. You read 
in the Scriptures certain startling and terrible 
words concerning the destiny of those who live and 
die in disregard or defiance of God, and you 
shuddered as you read them. You saw over against 
them the pattern of a life dazzling in its purity, divine 
in its disinterestedness, you knew that your life 
ought to be like it, and your intensest efforts could 
not make it so. You have struggled and watched 
and waited and prayed, but it has all been in vain. 
You felt the universal taint within you, you saw the 
irreversible doom before you, and in the revolt of 
despair you have flung it all away. It is perhaps 
too late to ask you whether your views of the Bible 
were as broad as they were deep; if you really 
think that the effect of the life of Jesus Christ 
ought to be not to save sinners but to drive sinners 
mad. You may have lost your faith in this way, 
because some of the doctrines which you held were 



A Lost Faith 23 

so sombre that the very Light of the World could 
not tinge them with hope. 

Or again, such a state of mind may seem to you 
mystical, monkish, mediaeval. Your faith in the 
gospel has gone down at the touch of the spirit of 
modern inquiry. It cannot be that if you have 
ever known it and valued it, if you have any real 
comprehension of what it is and what it has done, 
you should let it go merely because others have 
done so. You will not, if you are a thoughtful 
and serious person, let a gust of fashion which 
seems to be blowing across society, topple over 
your most sacred beliefs. They are but fragile 
things if that can happen. You will not let them 
be puffed out of existence by the mockery of a 
sprightly and flippant essayist, whose easy philoso- 
phy quietly ignores what you know to be the 
broadest facts of human life and the deepest in- 
stincts of the human soul. That is not modern 
thought. St. Paul confronted it at Athens. Horace 
wove it into graceful alcaics in the sensuous idle- 
ness of his Sabine farm. No, it is the great dis- 
coveries of natural science, and the methods of 
thought which it encourages, which have so rudely 
shaken your ancient faith. But here also you have 
of course been careful to distinguish what is really 
established from what is only conjectured. If you 
are not yourself a scientific expert, you have taken 
into account only that which wise and cautious men 
have agreed to accept as proved. And since the 



24 Life Indeed 

phenomena of religion cannot be measured or 
weighed, since they belong to a sphere beyond the 
reach of telescope or microscope, you have tested 
the fitness of your scientific leaders to be the guides 
of your thought in these invisible realms. You 
have inquired into their logical methods. You 
have made sure that they are as careful in collect- 
ing and as impartial in comparing the facts of 
human as of physical nature. You have exacted 
of them clear definitions. If they speak of matter 
and force, you have found out precisely what they 
mean by matter and force. You have found it es- 
tablished beyond a question that there is here no 
jugglery of words, that the ultimate fact of the 
universe is really something else than the God 
whom you ignorantly worshipped. Such an in- 
quiry has led you along perilous heights of thought, 
but you have fearlessly scaled them. You have 
shrunk from no labor, have been daunted by no 
obstacles in the pursuit of truth. You surely would 
not give up a faith so dear, so hallowed, so benefi- 
cent, because any teacher tells you it is vain, or be- 
cause much of the literature of your time makes 
haste to repeat, with every variety of incomplete- 
ness and distortion, conclusions which sweep it 
away. You have yielded your ground only inch by 
inch, as one who is defending his most sacred 
treasures. And you have surrendered these at last, 
precious still, more precious than ever if you have 
found no other beliefs more consoling and inspiring 



A Lost Faith 25 

to take their place — you have surrendered them be- 
cause you could keep them no longer. And from 
your earnest, distracted, truth-loving soul, there 
rises into the empty heavens the bitter cry, ''They 
have taken away my Lord, and I know not where 
they have laid Him.'^ 

If now in one of these ways or in any other, you 
have lost your faith in the religion of Jesus Christ, 
let me say to you three things. 

The first is : Be sure that it is dead. It may be 
only sleeping. It may rise into a life larger, more 
beautiful, more fruitful than before. It may be that 
there is after all a personal, loving, forgiving God. 
It may be that He has a care for the soul of man, 
with its certain possession of reason and its pas- 
sionate longing for immortality. Perhaps He even 
cares for you, and by paths that you do not know 
is leading you to a better knowledge of Himself 
and to a nobler and truer life. Perhaps He will let 
you see that you cannot do without Him, without 
the light of His revelation, without the knowledge 
of His Son. Do not make haste to bury your re- 
ligion. Do not publish abroad your resolution to 
get on hereafter without it. You too may find 
yourself standing one day in helpless and hopeless 
desolation, among the chilling shadows of life, and 
One whom you in your blindness supposed to be 
only a man like yourself will utter your name, and 
you will fall at His feet, like the Magdalen in the 
Garden, with a great cry of joy. 



26 Life Indeed 

But if this is not so and your faith is never again 
to come to life, then you will do well to mourn for 
it. Do not exult in your disbelief as an escape 
from superstition. It is the greatest calamity that 
has ever befallen you. It is not an emancipation, 
it is a bereavement. The soul or the century that 
has parted with its religious faith, ought to be pro- 
foundly sad. 

Upon the white sea sand 

There sat a pilgrim band 
Telling the losses that their lives had known, 

While evening waned away 

From breezy cliff and bay, 
And the strong tide went out with weary moan. 

One spake with quivering lip 

Of a fair-freighted ship 
With all his household to the deep gone down ; 

And one had wilder woe 

For a fair face long ago 
Lost in the darker depths of a great town. 

There were who mourned their youth 

With a most loving truth, 
For its brave hopes and memories ever green ; 

And one upon the west 

Turned an eye that would not rest, 
For far-off hills whereon his joys had been. 

Some spake of vanished gold, 

Some of proud honors told, 
And some of friends that were their trust no more; 

And one of a green grave 

Beside a foreign wave. 
That made him sit so lonely on the shore. 



A Lost Faith 27 

But when their tales were done, 

There spake among them one, 
A stranger, seeming from all sorrow free : 

" Sad losses have ye met, 

But mine is heavier yet, 
For a believing heart is gone from me." 

** Alas ! " these pilgrims said, 

" For the living and the dead. 
For fortune's cruelty, for love's sure cross, 

For the wrecks of land and sea. 

But howe'er it came to thee, 
Thine, stranger, is life's last and heaviest loss." 

Finally, if you have lost the faith that you once 
had, get another. Not to make you a decent and 
orderly citizen. Your natural disposition, your 
early education, the forces of a society which is as 
full of the influences of the religion you have dis- 
carded, as the noonday air is full of light, may 
still keep you honest and gentle and pure. Not to 
give you tranquillity of mind ; you may go through 
life cheerfully and meet death calmly believing 
nothing. You can stiffen your fortitude to meet 
the inevitable, you can train your courage to face 
the unknown. But to be a man whose nature is 
moulded by the finest influences, whose soul is in- 
spired by the grandest ideals, whose life is exalted 
to the highest levels, you must have some religious 
faith. Do not take Christianity if you cannot be- 
lieve in it, but be sure that the faith which you 
adopt is a better one than the religion of Christ ; 



28 Life Indeed 

not freer from mysteries, not easier in its obliga- 
tions, — these things are not merits in a reUgion ; 
but more subUme in its doctrines, more convincing 
in its evidences, more inspiring in its motives, more 
mighty in its power to transform and to elevate 
character. Let it be a religion which not only 
makes you a broader and better man, but which 
will do for the world, in the future, more than 
Christianity has done, and is doing. And if you 
look in vain for such a religion, then come back 
and consider whether there is not a divine meaning 
in a certain Roman cross and a certain empty 
tomb. 



DE PROFUNDIS 



Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O 
Lord, — Psalm cxxx. i. 



II 

DE PROFUNDIS 

The depths of which the Psalmist speaks were 
those of penitence. We do not know his name, or 
the nature of his sin, or what led him to repent of 
it, or what caused him to believe that God would 
forgive it. But it evidently occasioned him great 
distress, and out of this he cried to God for mercy. 
His prayer was answered, and he obtained the for- 
giveness which he sought. 

It shows that sin is not a modern thing. It 
shows that repentance is not a purely Christian sen- 
timent. The sense of guilt is as ancient and as 
universal as the human race. And whenever and 
wherever it has been profoundly felt, men have 
cried to God for pity and for pardon. We observe 
this in connection with every form of religious be- 
lief, and we observe it in the case of those who 
have had little thought or care in regard to religion. 
Whenever the conscience is profoundly stirred, men 
instinctively cry out to God. 

The same is true of one who finds himself plunged 
into great depths of sorrow. When life is bright 
and the heart is glad, we are very often unmindful 
of the fact that all our happiness comes from Him, 
and that we owe to Him at least the tribute of grati- 
31 



32 Life Indeed 

tude. It is not impossible for us even to go on for 
many days or years, with no distinct acknowledg- 
ment of His goodness, and no recognition of our 
obligations to Him. But when some overwhelming 
grief befalls us, we remember Him. We ought to 
think of Him as the author of our joy. We almost 
always think of Him as the author of our sorrow. 
And if we have never before asked anything of 
Him, we are then very apt to ask His help. Some- 
times it is light that we want, and we demand of 
Him that He shall tell us why He has thus afflicted 
us. Oftener still it is comfort and strength. Our 
burden seems heavier than we can bear. The 
nearest of our friends cannot help us to bear it. 
And out of the depths of our distress we cry to 
God. At such a time we seem to be face to face 
with Him. Things that have long amused us or 
absorbed us fade away. And we send up our 
prayer for comfort to Him who alone can enable us 
to bear the trial He has sent upon us. 

The same is true again of almost any one who 
finds himself in sudden and imminent peril. You 
remember the vivid picture in the one hundred and 
seventh Psalm of those who go down to the sea in 
ships, and do business in great waters, and who are 
thus exposed to the danger of shipwreck. ^^ Then 
they cry,** it says, ^^unto the Lord in their trouble, 
and He bringeth them out of their distresses.'* It 
happens far oftener now than then. A careless 
company of people may somewhere at this moment 



De Profundis 33 

be lounging and chatting on a ship's deck. There 
is an outbreak of fire, or the crash of a coUision. 
Everything is excitement and confusion. And 
those who never prayed before cry out to God to 
have pity upon them and save them. So whenever 
an unexpected casualty happens, and men find 
themselves confronting death, or when in sickness 
the resources of human skill prove unavailing, and 
the tenderest human love is helpless, in the dire 
emergency and the desperate danger the soul in- 
stinctively cries out to God. The danger may pass 
and the old mood of religious indifference return, 
but one never forgets such an experience ; no one 
ought to forget the lesson which it teaches. 

So it is again very often, when one finds himself 
facing a difficult duty. In the ordinary concerns 
of life we may not feel any particular need of di- 
vine guidance or help. It is not easy to keep this 
constantly in mind amidst the innumerable things 
that we are doing every day. But when an un- 
usual responsibility is laid upon us, and we are 
compelled to undertake some task of critical im- 
portance, we not only recognize, but we do not 
hesitate to confess it. It is not merely a concession 
to the religious prejudices of the people, or a com- 
pliance with long-established usage when a newly- 
elected president of the United States, on entering 
upon his office, publicly expresses the sense of de- 
pendence upon God. On the eve of a great battle, 
many a stout soldier has been heard to pray. Be- 



34 Life Indeed 

fore attempting a difficult operation, many a devout 
physician has been known to ask God's help. At 
such times we feel that we may properly do this. 
Out of the depths of our need, we naturally cry to 
God. 

We all do the same thing when we find ourselves 
in the depths of discouragement and of despond- 
ency. When we are disappointed at the ill success 
of efforts we have made ; when we are baffled by 
difficulties that we could not foresee and cannot 
surmount ; when we are uncertain as to what we 
ought to do ; when we are in doubt as to those on 
whom we can depend ; in a word, when our judg- 
ment wavers and our courage fails, we are very apt, 
are we not, to look upward and ask counsel and 
aid — the counsel and aid of God. Conscious of 
our weakness, we cry to Him for strength ; hope- 
less of success without His help, we pray that He 
will guide and help us. 

And then once more, not to multiply these illus- 
trations, we are all apt to cry to God out of the 
depths of some unwonted joy. We take, as I have 
said, the ordinary blessings of life with little thank- 
fulness, with little serious recognition even, of the 
source from which they come. But now and then 
there comes to us a happiness so great, so un- 
expected, so overwhelming, that our hearts are 
lifted by it above their ordinary level, as a ship is 
lifted by a rushing wave. The ordinary language 
of life is then insufficient to express our deep emo- 



De Profundis 35 

tion. It is not enough for us to gather in the con- 
gratulations of our friends, or to manifest our new- 
found happiness by any look or gesture of delight. 
^' Thank God/ ^ we say, ^^ Thank God!*' The 
words may sound strangely on our lips. But they 
are forced from the depths of our rejoicing hearts 
by that intensity of feeling which finds no other 
adequate expression. 

So it is then very often with men of different na- 
tures, different training, different opinions and 
beliefs. When life moves calmly on upon its ordi- 
nary level, they seldom think, perhaps, of God, 
they care little about Him. He is not in all their 
thoughts, and perhaps not in any of them. They 
are not conscious of their dependence upon Him, 
they do not recognize their obligations to Him. 
But as soon as they find themselves in some one of 
the graver and more critical experiences of life, 
when the depths of their souls are stirred, and the 
voice of human nature makes itself heard, you 
find them crying out to God. It may be in faith 
and hope. It may be in terror and despair. But 
His is the name which then leaps to their lips. 
Out of the depths of their souls there goes up to 
Him an instinctive though perhaps involuntary 
prayer. 

Now there is, I think, something extremely sug- 
gestive in this. It may not prove anything, but it 
certainly seems to indicate that there is a natural 
affinity between our souls and God. For these are 



36 Life Indeed 

occasions when our true nature speaks and acts. 
The restraints of conventionaHty and of habit are 
laid aside. The influences of training and of envi- 
ronment no longer control us. There is no fear of 
men before our eyes. But we feel that we must 
reach, and reach at once, the highest source of aid 
and comfort which we can possibly attain. We 
are face to face with supreme realities. And what 
do we do ? We cry out for God. It is as if we 
knew that our souls can find their true satisfaction, 
that our nature finds its real completeness, that our 
wants attain their full supply, in Him alone. It is 
as if we realized that we are made for Him as well 
as by Him, that there is an indestructible bond of 
kinship between us. So a mother and child, after 
long separation, rush into one another's embrace, 
heedless of the throng of unknown or indifferent 
strangers who may be standing by. So the elec- 
tricity that is in the cloud recognizes its affinity 
with that which is in the earth, and leaps to unite 
with it, forcing its way through whatever obstacles 
may intervene. If there were not such an inde- 
structible bond between us and the infinite and 
eternal One above us, we certainly should not so 
promptly, invariably, passionately, cry out for Him 
from the deepest experiences of life and in those 
moments when the deepest impulses of our nature 
are aroused. Augustine's familiar words are true, 
*^Thou, O God, hast made us, and made us for 
Thyself; and our hearts are restless until they rest 



De Profundis 37 

in Thee.** While we are floatmg calmly on the 
bright current of our ordinary life, we easily forget 
this. We feel no need of rest. But when the 
waves and billows of some tempestuous experience 
threaten to overwhelm us, it becomes to us a reality 
in comparision with which everything else appears 
unreal. The depths are then uncovered, and the 
fact is revealed to us that we are akin to the Infin- 
ite, that we bear the image of our Maker, that we 
are the children of God. 

Then again this habit which we so often observe 
shows how profound and how ineradicable is the 
faith of man in God. There is in the world not a 
little formal atheism ; there is much more practical 
atheism. Men lose themselves in speculation and 
conjecture as to everything that lies outside the 
sphere of the senses. Unable to demonstrate that 
which can be subjected to no sensible tests nor 
brought within the range of an inexorable logic, 
they persuade themselves that there is nothing 
there, or that at least they can know nothing 
about it. As to the old doctrine of a personal God, 
who is in living relations with His creatures, on 
whose care and bounty they depend, whose moral 
law it is their duty to obey, they declare that they 
do not believe in it, that no really intelligent man 
can any longer believe in it. And yet all the time 
there is in the depths of their souls an underlying 
and inextinguishable faith in such a God. It is 
not a matter of tradition or of early training. It is 



38 Life Indeed 

not a conclusion to which they have been led by- 
processes of philosophic thought. It is one of the 
elementary principles, one of the primary convic- 
tions of the human mind. Look over the world, 
study its various races, examine its different reli- 
gions, you will find everywhere the belief in God. 
Take the men of highest culture and widest knowl- 
edge, in this or any other Christian land, those 
who say that they do not believe in Him, or who 
act as if they did not, and let some critical experi- 
ence uncover the foundations of their thought and 
feeling, and you will find, far down below all the 
doubts and questionings that may appear upon the 
surface, a faith in Him and a reverence for Him 
which have not been and which can never be de- 
stroyed. 

Then again the fact of which I am speaking 
shows why it is that men so often do not look to 
God in the spirit of obedience and the spirit of 
confidence, — why they are so often indifferent or 
skeptical about Him. It is because they are mov- 
ing on the surface of life. The inmost depths of 
their nature have never been disturbed. It is in 
some respects fortunate that this has been the case. 
One cannot bear to pass very often through these 
critical experiences to which I have referred. They 
are as exhausting as they are illuminating. But so 
long as one sails calmly and prosperously over 
summer seas, he has little conception of the great 
depths beneath him or of what the fury of the 



De Profundis 39 

storm can do. And there are few of us who really 
know what is in the depths of our own souls. We 
are cheered and charmed by the brightness and 
beauty of the world around us. We do not sus- 
pect the energy or the significance of the tremen- 
dous forces within us. And so it is that in their 
easy-going and comfortable lives men often fancy 
that they can get along as well without God as with 
Him. They feel no need of His guidance, His help, 
His comfort. Why should any one fancy that he 
needs these or that it is possible to have them? 
And the skepticism or indifference of those who 
speak and act in this way affects multitudes of 
others. Ah, but if you are going to take the testi- 
mony of anybody in this matter, take that of some 
one who knows what life really is, some one who 
has really lived, some one who has gone down into 
the depths of sorrow or fear or penitence. Do not 
be satisfied with the superficial views of life which 
are very naturally the common views of it. But 
let the nobler, more serious, and deeper thinkers 
of the world tell you what they have found out in 
regard to human nature, its capacities, its needs, 
its aspirations, and its moral helplessness. Search 
the Scriptures, or if you will not do that, study the 
poets from Sophocles to Dante, from Shakspeare to 
Browning. You will learn from them that life is 
no holiday matter, that the human soul has both 
powers and wants of which you, perhaps, have 
never dreamed. Before you make up your mind 



40 Life Indeed 

I 

either that there is no Hving God whom you can 
cry to, or that there is no use in appealing to Him 
in your need, consider the witness that has been 
borne to Him by those who have not been content 
or been able to drift lazily upon the surface, but 
have sounded the awful depths of life. 

And so the reason is apparent why God often 
sends us down into these depths. It is not that He 
has forgotten us or wishes to destroy us. It is only 
that we may find Him there. He knows very well 
that otherwise we may fail to discover Him. He 
knows how easily we are dazzled and misled by the 
lights that sparkle and dance around us ; He knows 
how easy it is for us to be content with what the 
passing hour may bring. He knows that when our 
immediate desires are gratified, we are only too apt 
to forget that we have any deeper desires. And so 
He sends disappointment upon us, or perplexity, 
or sorrow and affliction. He lets all His waves 
and billows go over us. He suffers us to struggle 
vainly and in the darkness, until our strength is 
exhausted and our hope itself extinct. Thiere was, 
perhaps, no other way by which we could be taught 
our ignorance, our weakness and our need of His 
almighty and ever-present help. Out of the depths 
we were forced to cry to Him, and our cry has 
brought Him to the rescue. We sometimes pity 
those who are called to pass through such an ex- 
perience. We are tempted to ask, like the Phari- 
sees of old, '^ Who did sin, this man or his par- 



De Profundis 41 

ents, * * that such a calamity should overtake him ? 
And yet they are richer than we in the knowledge 
of life, and richer far in that knowledge of God 
which comes by a deep experience of life. He 
who cries to Him out of the depths, learns in this 
way to say, '^I wait for the Lord; my soul doth 
wait, and in His word do I hope. My soul waiteth 
for the Lord more than they that watch for the 
morning ; I say, more than they that watch for the 
morning. For with the Lord there is mercy, and 
with Him is plenteous redemption." It is not a 
costly experience which teaches us that lesson. It 
is one from which we need not shrink. It is one 
for which we shall be forever grateful. 

And here is the ground of our belief in the 
permanence of religion in the world. We some- 
times feel, no doubt, as if the ages of faith had 
passed, or were, at all events, swiftly passing away ; 
as if religion were losing its hold on men ; as if 
after one or two generations more have come and 
gone, it will forever have disappeared. There is 
so much unbelief around us. And what is worse 
than unbelief, there is so much indifference to all 
spiritual things, to all moral obligations. Is not 
religion something which is peculiar to the earlier 
stages of human development, and which men will 
soon be able to dispense with ? No, because human 
nature is really the same to-day that it has always 
been. Life is more complex, more showy, more 
exciting. The things that are seen have more 



42 Life Indeed 

power than they once had to shut out of human 
view the things that are not seen. And Ufe is not 
only more varied and intense, it is vastly more 
fascinating and more joyous for most people than it 
used to be. But great crises of thought and feel- 
ing still come. They come as often as ever. 
Sooner or later they come to all of us. The great 
capacities and needs of which men were conscious 
in the days of Abraham and of David, are just as 
really in us. Now as then, we are called from 
time to time to go down into the depths, where no 
human hand or voice can reach us, and where we 
are utterly alone and utterly forlorn, unless we cry 
to God and He hears and answers us. It is only 
the surface of life which is changing. The depths 
of life remain from century to century the same. 
And therefore religion, which appeals to that which 
is deepest in human nature and in human experi- 
ence, is not going to lose its power over the mind 
or heart or conscience of mankind. And those of 
us who are interested in extending its influence, — 
what we want is simply to get below the surface 
of men's lives, and touch if we can their deeper 
nature. We need to rouse their consciences. We 
need to stir their hearts. We need to get behind 
the web of sophistry in which they so often wrap 
themselves up, to that which is m.ost radical, vital, 
and essential in their thought. We shall fail very 
often, no doubt, and be discouraged. But in its 
appeal to the deepest convictions and the most 



De Profundis 43 

secret desires of human nature, has always lain the 
power of religious truth. And God still speaks to 
men's souls and in them, with an authority and a 
power which they recognize when the accidents of 
life are torn away, and they face its eternal and un- 
changing realities. Nothing less than God can 
ever fully satisfy the human heart. And the time 
will never come when men will cease to cry to Him 
out of the depths. 

And yet it is not only in our times of distress 
that we need Him ; and He who alone is able to 
deliver us in the hour of trouble, is our ever-present 
Friend and Guide and Helper. We need Him in 
our bright days as well as in our dark days, — when 
all goes well with us, as truly as when the depths 
are uncovered and the foundations of the earth are 
seen. We owe to Him our gratitude, our rever- 
ence, our obedience, and our love, when He leads 
us in the green pastures and beside the still waters, 
just as much as when we are toiling, bewildered 
and almost exhausted, across the desert places of 
life. And we shall know how to seek His help in 
time of need, we shall rely upon it with a tranquil 
confidence, if we have come to know Him and trust 
Him in other and happier days. Is it not a sad 
and humiliating fact that there are so many of God's 
children who never think of Him or care anything 
about Him, except when they are forced to cry to 
Him out of the depths ? Happy is he who lives in 
daily converse and communion with God ; who in 



44 Life Indeed 

joy and in sorrow alike, in sunshine and storm, in 
life and death, waits patiently, submissively, cheer- 
fully, on Him ! He shall know the present com- 
fort and in time of need shall receive the blessed 
fulfillment of the promise, ^^When thou passest 
through the waters I will be with thee, and through 
the rivers, they shall not overflow thee ; when thou 
walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned, 
neither shall the flame kindle upon thee ; for I am 
the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy 
Saviour. ' ' 



GOD WRESTLING WITH MAN 



And Jacob was left alone ; and there wrestled a 
man with him until the breaking of the day. — Gen. 
xxxii. 24. 



Ill 

GOD WRESTLING WITH MAN 

It is no unusual thing to see a man wrestling 
with himself. There are at least two natures in 
each of us — the higher and the lower, the flesh and 
the spirit — and these two often come into sharp 
collision with each other. A man sometimes dis- 
covers that his worst enemy is not outside of but 
within him. It is his baser self, which is holding 
him back from the good thing that his soul longs 
for, which is keeping him down on a low and un- 
worthy plane of life. And he determines that he 
will not be thus thwarted and baffled. He locks 
arms, as it were, with the mean, selfish, evil spirit 
that has such a hold upon him, and by a tremen- 
dous and often long-protracted struggle he endeavors 
to subdue it. It is a splendid sight when it is 
bravely undertaken and triumphandy carried 
through. It is one of the saddest of sights when 
the evil nature proves too strong to be overcome, 
and when the soul's efforts to win its freedom end 
in a more complete and hopeless bondage. 

Every man whose life amounts to much has also 
to wrestle with the world. But it is not at all sad- 
dening to see one struggling against what we often 
call adverse circumstances, if his principles are 
47 



48 Life Indeed 

sound and his heart is pure and true. The contest 
will develop in him a stronger and manlier char- 
acter. The truest strength, the most genuine 
manliness can be developed in no other way. It 
requires a tough tussle with the world to harden a 
man's moral muscles, to teach him that he can be 
independent of the world and live his own life in 
freedom and peace, to show him how quickly and 
completely the world acknowledges the mastery of 
one who has the courage to face it boldly and re- 
fuse to submit to its dictation. And if one is to live 
the higher life of the spirit, it can only be in spite, 
not merely of the fashions and conventions and 
maxims of the world, but of the motives that gov- 
ern it and the ends that it pursues. 

Sometimes the enemy that meets one on his way 
is more formidable, because more mysterious and 
impalpable. It seems as if some mighty and 
malignant spirit were wrestling with him and de- 
termined to subdue him. Like Jacob he does not 
perhaps know its name. It has many names. But 
it lurks near every man*s path, springs upon him in 
unguarded moments, and even when successfully 
resisted and driven off, returns again and again to 
the attack. There are not many of us who have 
not at one time or another encountered that invis- 
ible adversary, and our conflict with him has prob- 
ably left us sorely wounded, even though we may 
have finally succeeded in putting him to flight. 

It is no rare thing, I say, to see men wrestling 



God Wrestling with Man 49 

with the world, the flesh, and the devil. But who 
ever heard of a man wrestling with God ? What 
an unequal strife ! Who could hope to be success- 
ful in it ? And what motive would lead any man 
to attempt it ? Can it be the desire to extort a re- 
luctant blessing from Him? But would not a 
blessing won by violence be in reality a curse? 
And is not God always ready to grant His blessing 
to every one who is prepared to receive it ? Out of 
the mysterious story of Jacob's conflict with one 
whom he did not know, a very strange — I will say a 
very horrible — conclusion has been drawn. It has 
led us to speak of wrestling with God. It has 
made us think of Him as our enemy, or at least our 
antagonist. It has been understood as teaching that 
if we want His blessing, we must in some w^ay 
wring it from Him. And so we still sometimes 
hear of agonizing in prayer. And the old idea of a 
strenuous contest still underlies the word. The 
fact of God's fatherly love is forgotten. The fact 
of His infinite grace is ignored. The great truth, 
of which both the Old and the New Testaments are 
full, that He is '*good, and ready to forgive, and 
rich in mercy to all who call upon Him," is for the 
moment quite lost sight of. And there rises before 
us the image of One with whom His children must 
wrestle in the darkness, and whose blessing, in- 
stead of being the free gift of His love, must be 
won through an agony of soul. 

Now I venture to say that whatever may be the 



50 Life Indeed 

meaning of Jacob's vision at Jabbok Ford, it cannot 
mean this. And I think that if you will study it 
with me for a few moments, you will see that it 
does not mean this. It was not he who wrestled 
there with God. It was God who wrestled with 
him. And this is a very different thing. 

He had reached a crisis in his life. His char- 
acter in his early years had been anything but 
noble. By treachery and falsehood he had deceived 
his father and stolen his brother* s birthright. This 
had been followed by an exile of twenty — perhaps 
forty — years, in which he had been practically a 
bond -servant in a far country. He was now re- 
turning to the land of his birth — the land which 
had been promised him as his inheritance. But 
his fate depended on the hostile or friendly disposi- 
tion of his brother, whom he had so deeply 
wronged and who had now become a powerful 
chieftain. The next day would decide his destiny. 
He sent his family over the mountain stream, and 
remained behind alone. 

'* And there wrestled a man with him until the 
breaking of the day.'* A man? So he thought 
at first. But as the night wore on he realized that 
it was not a man. The touch that threw his thigh- 
bone out of its socket was not that of a human finger. 
And when he declared, ^' I will not let Thee go ex- 
cept Thou bless me,'* it was no man's blessing that 
he sought. He knew that it was God who was 
contending with him. If he seemed to prevail, it 



God Wrestling with Man 51 

was only because his antagonist did not put forth 
all His power. He could not make Him tell His 
name. But he himself received a new name from 
Him, and the blessing that he asked for was given 
him. 

Is not the meaning of the story plain? He 
stood, as I have said, at a crisis in his life, — years 
of penitential and reformatory discipline behind 
him and a great destiny before him. He was to 
inherit the land of promise. He was to be the an- 
cestor of the chosen people who were ever afterward 
to bear his name. In the line of his posterity Jesus 
the Christ was to be born. For such an eminent 
position he was not yet wholly prepared. He 
needed to feel, as he had not yet felt it, the power of 
God. He needed to be made to yield, as he had 
never yet done, to the will of God. Before God 
could use him, as He meant to use him, He must 
conquer him. And He did conquer him in that 
solitary struggle at the crossing of the mountain 
brook. The victory was won when the wounded 
man felt that he was in the grasp of One who was 
mightier than himself, and cried out, **Tell me, I 
pray Thee, Thy name ; I will not let Thee go ex- 
cept Thou bless me.*' The victory was won when 
Jacob first realized that he was in the hands of God 
and then felt and uttered the intense desire to know 
God and to have God's blessing. And that, if I 
may say so, was what God wanted. That is why 
He met His servant in that lonely place and 



52 Life Indeed 

wrestled with him till the morning broke. It was 
the man — not God — who was conquered. And as 
he passed over Penuel, at sunrise, he was a new 
man. He was lame from the sore struggle, but he 
said *^I have seen God face to face/* and he was 
God's man from that hour onward forever. 

Now in this strange and somewhat perplexing 
story we have a parable of a common experience. 
*^ In that mysterious messenger who contended with 
the first Israelite, we see,** as an able writer has 
said, ^Uhe whole method of God in the education 
of men:— the girding circumstances, the encom- 
passing ideas and influences, the surrounding moral 
and spiritual forces, the arms of personal affection 
that hold us fast, the power of the beloved Teacher 
that gathers about us, the grasp of Christ, the great 
wrestle of God Himself. The whole universe 
comes to us through that symbolic presence, with 
its infinite power locked round us, with the pull 
and the twist and the uplift of the divine love, 
ready to impart an eternal good as soon as human 
nature shall have been sufficiently roused to re- 
ceive it.** 

To appreciate this we must in the first place rec- 
ognize the fact that God has designs upon us. He 
has a work for us to do, an office for us to fill. 
The humblest life has as truly its place in the di- 
vine order as the mightiest. The least of us is as 
plainly present as the greatest to His eye. But if 
we are to be fitted for His uses, we must yield our- 



God Wrestling with Man 53 

selves to His control. We must come into per- 
sonal contact with Him. We must recognize His 
power. We must have His blessing. We must 
receive from Him the new name we are to bear, 
and must feel that we belong to Him. 

Now there are many of us for whom such sur- 
render and submission are not easy. He is not 
very real to us. Our eyes have never seen Him. 
Our hands have never touched His powerful and 
gentle hand. We have never felt the strong em- 
brace of His encircling love. And there is only 
silence when we listen for His voice. It is hard for 
us therefore to subject our wills to His, to throw 
away our self-confidence and cast ourselves on His 
protection, to give up the attempt to find or make 
our own way in life, and let Him send us where He 
chooses. We have had our own way so long, have 
followed the beckoning of our own ambition, have 
ministered to our own wants, and pursued our own 
immediate advantage ; we have so long been plan- 
ning and laboring for ourselves that it is not easy to 
give ourselves up to the guidance and the service 
of Him to whom we rightfully belong. 

And that is why God has to wrestle with us in 
order that we may learn how real and how near He 
is, may have a just appreciation of His power, may 
yield our wills to His, and so may be prepared to 
receive His blessing. He meets us, it may be, as 
He met His servant of old, in some dark and soli- 
tary place. It is a crisis in our life. A new chap- 



54 Life Indeed 

ter in our personal history is about to be begun. 
We are stepping from boyhood into manhood, are 
passing from school or college into active life, are 
making some grave decision which will change all 
the complexion of the years that are to come. 
Then it is that God meets us. He throws His 
strong arms round us. He tries to force us to our 
knees. He seeks to make us realize that we are 
His, and submit our stubborn wills to His control. 
It is a momentous hour. All the memories of years 
gone by come back to us, — impressions made upon 
us in our childhood, resolutions formed and broken, 
convictions of duty that we have put aside, solemn 
and repeated admonitions of conscience which we 
have disregarded ; they return with overwhelming 
power, as God's Spirit strives with us once more 
and seeks to force us at last to give ourselves to 
Him. To how many a man is such an experience 
the turning-point from which a new life dates. He 
feels that he too has seen God face to face, and he 
rises up a new man and goes forth with the light 
and peace of heaven in his soul. 

Such an experience seems distinctly to repeat 
that by which the Supplanter was transformed into 
the Patriarch. But not every one comes thus 
clearly and consciously in contact with God. We 
are sometimes aware that there is an invisible power 
grappling with us, of whose nature and whose 
name alike we are ignorant. It buffets us when we 
are tempted to do wrong. It sets before us higher 



God Wrestling with Man 55 

ends than those we are pursuing. It makes us dis- 
contented with ourselves. It puts a certain con- 
straint upon our evil passions. It arouses our 
purer and nobler desires. It reveals to us the hol- 
lowness of an aimless or a selfish life. It appeals 
to our better nature, and seems trying to make us 
obedient to this. We feel that it is seeking not to 
hold us down but to lift us up. And yet so gentle 
is its grasp that we often succeed in shaking it off. 
Even when we are distinctly conscious that our true 
wisdom lies in yielding to it, we resent its mild con- 
straint, assert our freedom, and go our way un- 
blessed. 

And oftener still we do not recognize any such 
unseen presence in our lives. The thought that 
God is wrestling with us, seeking to subdue our 
wayward wills to His and to induce us to give our- 
selves to Him, does not so much as occur to us 
while the current of our life flows smoothly on. It 
is indeed hard to associate the smiling bounty of 
His providence, the gracious message of His word, 
the kindly influences of Christian friendships and 
examples, the hallowed power of the familiar insti- 
tutions of religion — I say it is hardly natural to 
connect these with a divine desire to conquer our 
pride and passion and self-will, and make us ready 
to bear and do what God requires of us. But it is 
seldom by violence that He seeks to conquer men. 
That would be easy for Him. The mere touch of 
His finger is enough to make us cringe and cower. 



66 Life Indeed 

And He sometimes lets us feel it. If He cannot 
subdue us by love, He sometimes makes us appre- 
ciate His power. But what He wants of us is not 
an abject but a loving and trustful submission. It 
is not His desire that we should yield to Him be- 
cause we are not strong enough to oppose Him, but 
rather because at last we know Him, and know that 
He is worthy to be loved and trusted. The pur- 
pose of the touch of power is not to terrify and 
crush us. It is rather to make us realize that He 
with whom we have to do is no mere man, but one 
whom it is both wise and safe for us to confide in 
and submit to. It is at once a revelation and a re- 
assurance. But there is love behind it. It is out 
of His great love for us that God enters into this 
divine wrestle with us. If He can conquer us by 
gentleness He will. If He can win our faith and 
love without our knowing that He has twined His 
mighty arms about us, He will do this. But all 
the benign influences that are acting upon us, in 
the sphere of our own thoughts as well as in the 
world without, are elements of a patient and de- 
termined effort to subdue our selfishness, to break 
down our pride, to make us realize that we belong 
to Him, to induce us to trust and to obey Him. 

Our common habit of distinguishing secular from 
sacred things often prevents us from recognizing 
this. The distinction is an important one. And 
yet the whole world belongs to God and He is ac- 
tive in it everywhere. And there is nothing in it 



God Wrestling with Man 57 

which He may not use as a means of winnmg man's 
confidence and love. For what other purpose is it 
really that He has built the solid globe and placed 
us on it, that He has arched above it the starry sky, 
that He makes the seasons pour their bounty into 
our hands ? And to what other end does He direct 
the events that befall us and in which we have our 
part ? Health and sickness, prosperity and disap- 
pointment, poverty and wealth, labor and rest, the 
studies that enlarge our thought, the honorable oc- 
cupations that employ our time, — what are they all 
but different phases of the great divine purpose 
which underlies our life ? If God is in anything. 
He is in everything. All times and places are open 
to Him. He may meet us at any hour and any- 
where. Nay, He never intermits His gracious 
striving with us, but by night as well as day, with 
unwearied patience, puts His continual pressure on 
us, if so be that at last we may recognize His right 
to us and yield ourselves to His control. 

Then only are we prepared to receive His bless- 
ing. As you read the story of this memorable 
scene in Jacob's life, it seems to me that you can 
touch its turning-point. As he remained at night 
alone, his nerves strung with keen expectation of 
what was to befall upon the morrow, there wrestled 
a man with him till the breaking of the day. Be- 
lieving at first that it was a man, not only, but an 
enemy, who had come to oppose his entering on 
his inheritance, he struggled with all his might to 



58 Life Indeed 

overcome him. But at a certain moment the mys- 
terious stranger put forth his finger and ^ touched 
the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's 
thigh was strained/' And the dawn began to 
brighten in the east. Then it was that it also 
dawned upon his mind that it was not an enemy 
but a friend whose arms encircled him. He no 
longer sought to overthrow or to escape from Him. 
He sought rather to hold Him fast till he should 
obtain His blessing. And he did obtain it. ^^ He 
blessed him there.'* That was the purpose for 
which he had come. But if so, why the long, 
furious struggle ? Not because the blessing must 
be wrung from Him against His will, but because 
the attitude of the Patriarch must first be changed 
from antagonism to entreaty, from a desire to con- 
quer to a willingness to obey. The change came 
at the moment when He felt that he was fight- 
ing against God and that this was vain and worse 
than vain. 

Any man who would have God's blessing must 
be prepared for it by a similar recognition of Him 
and a similar submission to His will. He is more 
ready to bestow than we are to receive the blessing. 
But so long as we stand out against Him, He will 
not, cannot, grant it to us. We must first learn 
the mystery of life, so far at least as to perceive 
that it is He who has beset us behind and before, 
and has laid His hand upon us. Realize that along 
all the way that you have travelled, in the far 



God Wrestling with Man 59 

countries where you have been Hving, in weary 
hours of trial and discouragement, God has been 
with you, though you may not have discerned Him, 
and has chosen and marked you for His own. He 
has been wrestUng with you patiently and lovingly 
for many years. He has sought by the prosperity 
and happiness that He has sent you to make you 
conscious of His tender love and care, and to draw 
you to Him by the cords of gratitude. And when 
you failed to perceive Him in the daylight, He has 
met you in the darkness. He has thrown His 
strong arm around you, and still you have not 
known Him. He has wounded you — He has had 
to wound you — because you struggled against Him. 
Can you not now see that it is He ? And is it not 
idle to resist Him ? O, if men only knew that God 
is not their enemy but their best friend ! If instead 
of holding Him off or trying to break away from 
His embrace, they would cling to Him, as Jacob 
did, exclaiming ^^I will not let Thee go, except 
Thou bless me ! " As soon as that prayer is offered 
the blessing comes and the morning breaks. There 
would have been no need of the long struggle if the 
soul had only yielded sooner to Him whose one 
supreme desire is to bless and save it. 

And yet one prayer of Jacob was denied. '^ Tell 
me,*' he said, *^I pray Thee, Thy name.'* He 
did not tell him, but answered, '* Wherefore dost 
thou ask after My name ? *' He did not, because 
He could not, tell him. Even Jacob was not pre- 



60 Life Indeed 

pared for that supreme revelation of God. It was 
enough that he should know Him under the names 
by which He had already revealed Himself. The 
world was not then prepared to know Him as He 
really was and as, long centuries afterward, He was 
to manifest Himself to it. Jacob knew that he had 
looked upon God's face, and it was enough. His 
nature remained hidden from him. 

It is given to us to speak the name which no Pa- 
triarch or Prophet ever heard. God's true nature 
has been unfolded to us. The Christian experience 
of a later age is woven into the symbolism of the 
ancient story in those verses of Charles Wesley, 
which were based upon this incident in Jacob's life. 

Come, O Thou Traveler unknown, 
Whom still I hold, but cannot see, 

My company before is gone, 
And I am left alone with Thee ; 

With Thee all night I mean to stay, 

And wrestle till the break of day. 

I need not tell Thee who I am, 

My misery or sin declare ; 
Thyself hast called me by my name ; 

Look on Thy hands and read it there ! 
But who, I ask Thee, who art Thou ? 
Tell me Thy name, and tell me now. 

Wilt Thou not yet to me reveal 
Thy new, unutterable Name ? 
Tell me, I still beseech Thee, tell ; 



God Wrestling with Man 61 

To know it now resolved I am : 
Wrestling, I will not let Thee go 
Till I Thy Name, Thy Nature know. 

Yield to me now, for I am weak. 

But confident in self-despair ; 
Speak to my heart, in blessings speak, 

Be conquered by my instant prayer ! 
Speak, or Thou never hence shalt move. 
And tell me if Thy Name is Love ! 

My prayer hath power with God ; the grace 

Unspeakable I now receive ; 
Through faith I see Thee face to face, 

I see Thee face to face, and live ; 
In vain I have not wept and strove. 
Thy Nature, and Thy Name, is Love. 

I know Thee, Saviour, who Thou art, 
Jesus, the feeble sinner's Friend ! 

Nor wilt Thou with the night depart. 
But stay, and love me to the end ; 

Thy mercies never shall remove. 

Thy Nature, and Thy Name, is Love. 

Contented now upon my thigh 
I halt, till life's short journey end. 

All helplessness, all weakness, I 

On Thee alone for strength depend ; 

Nor have I power from Thee to move ; 

Thy Nature, and Thy Name, is Love. 

Yes, that is the name which could not be dis- 
closed to Jacob, but it is that by which we now 
know God. It is the Infinite Love which is wres- 
tling with us, trying to win our recognition, our 



62 Life Indeed 

confidence, our responsive love. What a beautiful 
interpretation it gives to life to think of it in this 
way ; to see, not only in what we are accustomed 
to call religious influences, but in all the good in- 
fluences by which we are enfolded, expressions of 
God's loving desire and purpose to draw and hold 
us to Himself in order that He may bestow His 
blessing on us ! How strange it seems that we 
should not recognize Him, that we should ever re- 
sist Him ! What a blessed thing it is that He con- 
tinues to strive with us, instead of suddenly vanish- 
ing from us and leaving us in utter darkness ! And 
what a joyous thing, when His blessing has been 
gained, to go forth to meet the new day, the new 
duties, the new responsibilities, feeling that we are 
His and He is ours forever ! Here is the secret of 
peace, the secret of power, in the surrender of one's 
soul and of one's life to God, and in the continu- 
ing, confiding fellowship with God that follows it. 
Henceforth the way is plain, the burden light. We 
shall never again mistake the hand that touches 
ours. Though the darkness may gather over us 
we shall know that the mightiest and best of friends 
is with us. And when day breaks at last, we shall 
go, not halting, but with bounding steps, over the 
river, into the Promised Land. 



THE RESTORING OF SOULS 



He restoreth my soul, — Psalm xxiii. 3. 



IV 

THE RESTORING OF SOULS 

There is only one restorer of souls, but there are 
multitudes of souls which want restoring. We do 
not need to have formed any theories of human 
nature or to have been trained in any theological 
school ; we only need to look out upon society, or 
perhaps to look in upon our own hearts, in order 
to see that there is here a great and difficult and 
delicate work to be done, whether there is any 
power which is able to do it or not. 

For we have a more or less definite idea of what 
a soul ought to be — of what our souls were meant 
to be, when they came from the creative hand of 
God, and were entrusted, if I may say so, to our 
keeping and care. They w^ere surely intended both 
for activity and for enjoyment, but their enjoyment 
was meant to be derived not from those objects 
which appeal to the senses, but from those which 
are spiritual, like the soul itself; and their activity 
was meant to be spontaneous and free. They 
were designed to do easily and well, without fric- 
tion or conflict, the work assigned them. They 
were designed to live in harmony with them- 
selves, with nature and with God. They were 
made to grow, but to grow not by a continual 
65 



66 Life Indeed 

battling against opposition, by a series of spasmodic 
struggles, followed by reaction and exhaustion, but 
by a steady, harmonious, natural development, into 
an enlarged capacity, a fuller strength, a diviner 
beauty. That certainly is the law which elsewhere 
prevails in the universe which God has made. The 
planets swing smoothly on their bright circles, and 
there are no discords in the music of the spheres. 
Every living thing is finely fitted for the part as- 
signed it in the great drama of existence. There 
is nothing more astounding to us, and yet nothing 
more characteristic of the infinite resources of skill 
and power in the mind and will of the Most High, 
than the manner in which each form of life adapts 
itself to new conditions in the ceaseless transforma- 
tions of the material world, unfolding new capacities 
and putting forth new powers, in the upward move- 
ment which is everywhere exhibited. Everything 
within us and around us is in motion, but whirling 
atoms and circling suns are alike under a law of 
progress. There is no pause, there is no diversion, 
there is no waste of material or of energy. But 
silently and constantly the new creation is building 
itself out of the old. 

But when we look into the life of human souls, 
we seem to find not harmonious development but 
irregularity and discord, waste of power, confusion, 
and the continual need of restoration into the di- 
vine order, which has in some way been lost. 

Here, for instance, is a young and eager spirit, 



The Restoring of Souls 67 

which has entered Ufe full of hope and courage and 
energy, with pure tastes and generous affections 
and high ideals, enthusiastic in its pursuit of that 
which is noble and true, with a profound senti- 
ment of the grandeur of life, the sacredness of 
duty, the nearness of God, and with the strong de- 
sire to make its pathway through the world bright, 
not with the lustre of material success, but with the 
glory of a character and a career which men shall 
honor and God approve. But soon it is caught by 
some gust of temptation and whirled off, like a 
wandering star, out of the course which it was 
appointed to follow, toward some utterly selfish and 
unworthy end. On this its powers are all concen- 
trated. The fine balance of its faculties is lost. 
It becomes narrow and sharp, perhaps unscrupu- 
lous and cruel. It needs to be brought back to its 
orbit again, to be restored to the line of orderly, 
self-restrained, harmonious development, from 
which it has gone so far astray. 

Here is another soul which has become dis- 
couraged. It has not been misled by enthusiasm 
or betrayed by self-confidence. It has fully ap- 
preciated the dangers surrounding it and the diffi- 
culties that lie in its way. But in spite of these it 
has honestly and faithfully tried to make something 
of itself, and it seems doomed to failure. It finds 
the world a cold, hard, selfish place. It has been 
bafiled by its enemies and deceived by its friends. 
Its most careful plans have fallen to pieces; its 



68 Life Indeed 

sudden inspirations have proved bitter delusions. 
It feels as if there were no place for it in the Babel 
of human voices and passions, where it is lonely 
and helpless. And it longs for the day to end, and 
for the quiet night to come. Or else it feels as if 
it must give way, abandon the principles to which 
it is struggling to keep true, throw itself into the 
torrent, and let that bear it whithersoever it will. 
It needs, you see, to be restored to courage. 

Another soul has lost its faith in men, in God, in 
all things spiritual. It has been forced to see the 
darker sides of human nature, its meanness, its 
insincerity, its sensuality, its predominant selfish- 
ness, and it no longer believes in any real disinter- 
estedness, in any incorruptible integrity, among 
mankind. And God has come to seem further and 
further away. He does not appear to be accessible 
to prayer. His providence seems so unequal that 
the soul has grown to think that there is no provi- 
dence, or else it cannot reconcile this with the 
government of the world by natural law. It has 
found difficulties in believing in a divine revelation, 
and does not believe in it. A divine incarnation 
is more mysterious still, and faith in that is swept 
away. Immortality itself has at last become 
doubtful. And with the loss of all these the very 
foundations of morality have been undermined. 
There is but one step further which such a soul can 
take in this direction ; it is to doubt its own ex- 
istence. Evidently it needs to be restored to faith. 



The Restoring of Souls 69 

Or if it has kept its faith, it has lost its joyful- 
ness. Its childish mirth it expected to lose, but 
under repeated shocks of sorrow its elasticity of 
spirit is gone. One by one the dearest objects of its 
love have been taken from it, and it has been left 
forlorn and desolate. It has not lost its courage, but 
its courage has become a matter of simple resolute- 
ness of will. It is submissive and patient, but it is 
broken-hearted. It has no interest in life except to 
do its duty till the end shall come. It may brighten 
into a sudden cheerfulness, but it is only now and 
then and for an instant that the sun breaks through 
the clouds. Its prevailing temper is one of sadness, 
and hope is buried by the side of joy. Is it pos- 
sible that they can ever be restored to life ? 

Then another soul needs restoration into peace 
with itself. It is full of abounding and eager life, 
full of the keen joy of living, but it is conscious 
that it is not doing the best work that it is capable 
of doing; it is wasting its energies or a part of 
them ; it is divided in its ideals and its endeavors, 
and it is aware of a conflict going on all the time 
within it. It may be simply restless, and hardly 
understand its own complaint, or it may be dis- 
satisfied, ashamed, even furiously indignant with 
itself. It may heap upon itself all manner of bit- 
ter reproaches and form all manner of good resolu- 
tions. But there it is, disturbed by the ancient 
conflict between '^I would not*' and ^'I do,'* be- 
tween principle and desire, between purpose and 



70 Life Indeed 

performance, and it longs for the peace of a soul 
that is in full harmony with itself. 

Or it may be peace with God that it desires. 
There was a time when it loved Him and strove to 
do His wdll. But a great temptation came and it 
fell, — fell into an open and dreadful sin. In one 
dark and terrible moment, by one swift and shame- 
ful act, it seemed to cut itself off from Him, and 
the sense of His anger now rests upon it. It has 
mourned, how often and how bitterly, over its one 
great fault ; it has repented of it with keen self-re- 
proach and floods of tears. But it cannot forgive 
itself; how then can it hope that God will forgive 
it? "What possible restoration, ' ' it cries, '^into 
His love, can there be for me ? '* 

Or if its happiness and its hope are not blighted 
by one conspicuous act of wrong, it has come into 
bondage to a sinful habit. Little by little this has 
been tightening its fetters upon it, its very strug- 
gles to escape only fixing these more firmly, and 
making it more vividly conscious of its captiv- 
ity. But the habit has not yet become a nature ; 
the imprisoned soul is like a caged bird, which has 
not lost the sense of the free air that it was made 
for, and still struggles to escape. Who shall re- 
store it to liberty, that it may spread its wings and 
soar into the large and joyous life of those creatures 
of God, whom Satan has never caught and bound ? 

And, once more, for I need not multiply these 
illustrations, how many souls of us there are which 



The Restoring of Souls 71 

want to be restored to purity ? We are not guilty 
of flagrant vices, we are not perhaps under the do- 
minion of degrading habits, but we are stained, — 
spotted by the world. The freshness of our inno- 
cence is gone. We have become familiar with 
many forms of sin. Our consciences have become 
less sensitive ; the light that is in us has been grow- 
ing dim. Our judgments of character have been 
growing less severe ; our standards less pure and 
high. We look with allowance on many things at 
which we should once have revolted ; we count it 
nothing to omit many things which we should once 
have thought it a shame to neglect. We used to 
be devout, but we have become indifferent or 
scornful. We have lost our gentleness and become 
hard-hearted; we have lost our earnestness and 
become flippant or cynical. Others observe and 
deplore the change that has taken place in us, but 
no one knows, as well as we do, how greatly our 
purity has suffered, how deeply these stains have 
struck into our souls. This then is what we want 
above all other things, to be made clean again, to 
be restored to purity. 

Now we need not, I think, go any more pro- 
foundly than this into what may be called the 
pathology of souls, to perceive that the work of 
restoring them is a very important and difficult and 
dangerous task. It is important because a soul 
that is diseased, that is out of Harmony with itself, 
with nature, and with God, causes in the first 



72 Life Indeed 

place an immense waste of moral power. Think 
of the almost measureless capacities which a pure 
and perfect soul possesses, for knowledge, for happi- 
ness, for high and holy service of God, within the 
sphere of this present life and in the vaster spheres 
of the life to come ; and then consider the incal- 
culable loss of possible good, which comes from 
the paralyzing of its powers, when it is spending 
its force in conflict with itself or lying in the 
lethargy of doubt or despondency or fear. Or 
rather, since the great law of the conservation of 
energy holds true in the moral as in the physical 
government of God, the energies which should 
have been directed to the building up of character, 
the advancement of God's kingdom, the promo- 
tion of righteousness and peace, become energies 
of destruction, working toward the overthrow of 
all moral order, toward the ruin of the soul in 
which they are operating, and of all other souls 
upon which it acts. The restoring of a soul is a 
matter of the utmost consequence for its own sake, 
by reason of the immortal joys that it misses and 
of the inevitable miseries that it suffers if it con- 
tinues unrestored. But the whole moral universe 
is concerned in it as well, because of the beneficent 
activity which is wasted and the destructive influ- 
ence which is let loose, when a human soul breaks 
away from its orbit and starts off in a wild and 
wanton career. 

And yet it is no easy matter to restore a soul. 



The Restoring of Souls Y3 

I! you do not think so, try to do it. Go to one 
that is crushed by a great sorrow, and see if your 
tenderest sympathy, your most soothing and com- 
forting words, can bring ^Hhe light of smiles again 
to lids that overflow with tears. '* Go to one that 
is despondent, and see if your exhortations to cour- 
age and your cheerful tones can lift from the bur- 
dened spirit the weight of gloom that has settled 
upon it. You might almost as well try to draw 
back the curtains of the midnight and bring forth 
the sun from the chambers of the east. How much 
less then is it within the compass of any human 
power, to restore purity to the soul that is conscious 
of guilt, or peace to one that is tossed to and fro 
by the waves of an inward unrest, or the sense of 
God's forgiveness to one which has come to feel 
the sense of God's wrath ! 

Nay, it is an office as dangerous as it is difficult. 
For the peril is that in delivering it from one evil, 
you will plunge it into another, and not restore it 
after all. You may save it from despondency, but 
it will be by leading it to take a light view of its 
failures. You may give it peace, but it will be by 
destroying its aspirations after purity. You may 
make bold to speak for God and assure it that its 
apprehensions of His anger are superstitious de- 
lusions, but if you persuade it to accept your words, 
you will have destroyed its reverence for Him and 
have brought confusion into all its ideas of the 
principles on which His government is based. And 



74 Life Indeed 

this incalculable mischief men are all the time 
doing when they try to restore one another's souls. 
Sometimes they mistake the true nature of the dis- 
order ; sometimes their fatal error is in applying a 
remedy which only aggravates the evil. You ob- 
serve, for instance, on the face of a friend a shadow 
of anxiety or care, which betokens a soul that is 
ill at ease, and in order to bring back the old ex- 
pression of careless gaiety, you invent distraction, 
and urge rest, amusement, change of scene. But 
the peace that you perhaps succeed in restoring is 
not the peace of God, which His Spirit was ready 
to bestow ; it is the peace of spiritual indifference 
and death. You may have destroyed the soul that 
you desired to heal. How often sorrow is sent as 
a divine influence to make a heedless mind thought- 
ful or a hard heart tender ; to bring a soul face to 
face, as it were, with the realities of the unseen 
world ; to awaken desires that had been slumbering, 
and open again capacities that had been choked up 
by earthly pleasure or success. But your first 
thought is to restore it to happiness, if you can do 
so, though you can do so only by restoring it to 
the condition of religious apathy, from which the 
providence of God has aroused it. And this is 
why, as I said, the restoration of a soul is such a 
delicate thing. It is a task too vast for our power 
and too fine for our skill. We cannot even restore 
our own souls, and how shall we succeed in restor- 
ing others ? 



The Restoring of Souls 75 

Is it not a comfort then to know that He who 
alone is equal to this great office is willing to per- 
form it ? It is a divine work, and divinely does 
God accomplish it. He does it often in unnoticed 
ways, by a power as silent and as gradual, as that 
by which He brings back the earth from the cold 
and hard desolation of winter, into the bursting 
luxuriance of June. But He does it ; He does it in 
His own way ; and there is nothing else which He 
is so intent upon doing. He did not make the 
soul of man to be a destructive force in the uni- 
verse, at variance with itself and at enmity with 
Him, and the very first end of His providence and 
His grace is to bring it back into an orderly and 
harmonious life. 

And observe how He does this. It is, first of all, 
by revealing Himself to it. The true source of all 
the disorders of souls is their forgetfulness of God. 
They have lost the great consciousness that they 
came from Him and are to return to Him again, 
and that He is Himself present within them. The 
eye has become blind to His glory ; the ear has be- 
come deaf to His voice. And that is why one has 
rushed off in hot chase of some earthly good, 
and another has lost hope and courage, and an- 
other is borne down by sorrow, and another has 
been swept away by temptation, and all have be- 
come spotted by the world. It is because they 
have forgotten Him who is over and around and 
within them, who is the law and the end of their 



76 Life Indeed 

life, who is their very life itself. And so when He 
restores a soul, it is to this first that He restores it, 
to the appreciation of the fact that He is, that it is 
encompassed and animated by Him. 

Then the second step in the divine process of 
restoration is to make a soul aware of God's love. 
Not merely from Him does the power go forth by 
which it lives and moves, but He is watching over 
it with a fatherly and faithful care. It is not lost 
to His view amid the swarms of His creatures, but 
He has a personal knowledge of it. All its wants 
and its weaknesses, its successes and its failures, its 
aspirations and its discouragements are perfectly 
manifest to Him. It is the wonder of His infinite 
nature that each soul is as plainly present to Him, 
as if in all the universe it were the only soul. And 
not only so, but He has a purpose for it, a definite 
plan for its life and action. There is a path which 
He has meant it to follow, and in pursuing that 
path its true happiness and peace are found. Its 
disorder and its wretchedness have come from its 
deliberate choosing of some other course or its un- 
conscious wandering away from that which He has 
appointed for it. And it cannot be restored till it 
has learned that God has something for it to be and 
do. And not merely that, again, but far as it has 
wandered from Him, it has not gone beyond the 
reach of His love. He follows it still with a 
strong, deep, personal affection, and longs to have 
it return to its duty and to Him. Now it is by 



The Restoring of Souls 77 

bringing this to its knowledge, by impressing this 
upon its feeling, that He seeks to restore it to its 
true relation to Himself, and so to establish within 
it His own peace and purity and joy. 

But it is not enough that it should know and feel 
this. It is here that its recovery begins, but not 
here that it is completed. For then He sends a 
holy and gracious influence upon it, the influence 
of His own Spirit, to bring it back into the life in 
Him and for Him from which it has gone so far 
astray. Silently but mightily that Spirit works 
upon it, not as a rushing, resistless force, but as an 
inward, transforming energy. It gives birth to new 
affections, new hopes, new desires. It begets a 
fresh courage in the room of despondency. It 
sheds abroad a holy and heavenly joy in the place 
of gloom and grief. It restores strength to the 
fainting spirit, and faith to the heart that has 
ceased to trust. It subdues the will that has 
struggled to have its own way, and makes it admit 
that God's way is best. It comes to the soul that 
is crushed and broken by the sense of sin, and it 
does not teach it that sin is a thing of no conse- 
quence, to be banished from the thoughts as quickly 
as possible, or an inherited taint for which we are 
not responsible, or a disease from which we shall 
recover by some natural process. But it leads it to 
see in the Lord Jesus Christ its only and its all- 
sufficient Saviour. It leads it to trust in Him for 
pardon and to look to Him for cleansing, to find in 



Y8 Life Indeed 

Him the cure of its present distresses and the in- 
spiration of its future character. Not merely by 
the revelation of Himself in His being, His care, 
His wise purpose, His gracious love, does God re- 
store the souls that have fallen out of harmony with 
Him and themselves. But He sends upon them 
His Holy Spirit to bring them back, through Him 
who is alone ^^the Way.'* 

Is it not plain that our souls need to be thus re- 
stored? Have we not often found our courage 
failing, our joy overclouded with sorrow? Have 
we not found ourselves swinging off from our true 
course into the pursuit of ends that we knew to be 
unworthy of us, and been discontented and dis- 
tressed because we knew it was all so wrong? 
Have we not, perhaps, found our faith growing 
faint, and dreadful doubts of God's wisdom and 
love distracting our minds ? Are we not conscious 
of a sharp conflict within us between our desires 
and our purposes, or between our purposes and 
our actual conduct? Do we not tremble some- 
times when we think of some great sin that we have 
committed, which we would gladly have forgotten 
but which we cannot forget? Are we not in 
bondage to some bad habit which we have vainly 
struggled to throw off? Are we not at least con- 
scious of many a stain which has fallen upon us in 
our passage through the world ? However it may 
be that our souls have become what they are, is it 
not evident that they are not what they ought to 



The Restoring of Souls 79 

be ? We have broken away from the divine order. 
We are out of harmony with ourselves and with 
God. We need to be restored to this again. 

And how shall this great result be brought 
about ? Shall we set ourselves upon the task of do- 
ing it ? Shall we try to brush off this or that fleck 
that has fallen upon our purity ? Shall we try to 
curb this or that wrong impulse, and to bring our 
desires under a firm restraint ? Shall we say to our 
souls in their discouragement, ^^Come, be of good 
cheer,'* or in their consciousness of sin, ^^Go, and 
sin no more" ? Shall we attempt by study to re- 
gain our faith, or by self-indulgence to recover our 
joyfulness? Ah, not in ways like these shall we 
conquer back that deep and lasting peace which has 
gone from us and which we long to have restored. 

Shall we not rather, first of all, admit the lesson 
of our own experience that if we cannot keep our- 
selves steadfast in the line of duty, pure from the 
corruptions that are in the world, strong in the faith 
which once we had, true to the high purposes with 
which we set out in life, we cannot ourselves regain 
these, after they are lost. Shall we not then go to 
God, and ask Him to restore us ? Shall we not 
seek the renewing, illuminating, strengthening in- 
fluences of His Holy Spirit, to do the work which 
we are powerless to do ? Shall we not realize that 
all our trouble comes from our having got away 
from Him, and so make it our chief object to get 
back to Him again, and to come under His inspira- 



80 Life Indeed 

tions ? He is, He loves us, He has a plan for us, 
He is longing to restore us — it is in the sense of 
this that our recovery must begin. 

And how shall we get back to Him — how, ex- 
cept through Christ in whom He has Himself come 
near to us ? Ah, when we realize God's being, as 
Christ has revealed it, when we feel His love as 
Christ has shown it, when His divine light comes 
in Christ and takes possession of our souls, that is 
our only true and permanent restoration. It is 
when we give ourselves to Him in grateful love and 
consecrated and holy service, when He gives Him- 
self to us, as a power of righteousness formed 
within us and mastering us more and more — it is 
only then that we come back into harmony with 
God and with ourselves. For then it is no longer 
we who live, but Christ who liveth in us. His 
own wonderful words are then fulfilled, *^ I in them 
and Thou in me.'' The long strife is ended, and 
the heavenly peace begun. The shadows have 
broken apart, and the day has dawned. The fitful 
fever of our spiritual unrest has subsided; the 
soul's pulses move with a strong and steady beat, 
and we begin to grow toward the sound and perfect 
manhood of those who walk, not after the flesh, 
but after the spirit. 

O Thou great Restorer of souls, come thus into 
our souls, and restore them to purity and joy and 
peace ! 



THE WORK OF GOD 



Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the 
work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He 
hath sent, — John vi. 29. 



THE WORK OF GOD 

There is, then, as these Jews thought, a work of 
God. There is something which He would have 
us do. But if so, we want, of course, to know 
and do it. It is certainly our duty, and it will 
with equal certainty prove in the end to be for our 
advantage. We are all interested, therefore, in 
Jesus' statement of it. It is very concise, very 
simple and at the same time not a little perplexing. 
** This is the work of God," He says, ^^that ye be- 
lieve on Me." His meaning cannot be mistaken. 
It is not merely that He is entitled to men's confi- 
dence, nor that it is the duty of all men to give 
Him their confidence. He means to assert that 
this is the one supreme duty of all men. It com- 
prehends all other duties. It is the work of God. 
And to believe on Him, which is the form of ex- 
pression that He uses here, as He used it on many 
other occasions, denotes the strongest possible be- 
lief; it signifies an absolute, unhesitating, unre- 
served reliance upon Him. Not merely the ac- 
knowledgment that He was a messenger from God ; 
not merely the acceptance of His words as words of 
unimpeachable authority and truth ; not merely the 
confession of Him as the rightful Lord of thought 
83 



84 Life Indeed 

and life, or the endeavor to obey His precepts and 
to copy His example ; — to believe on Christ means 
even more than this. It is fully to admit His ut- 
most claims as to His nature, His authority, and 
His mission to this world. It is to render Him the 
homage to which He is entitled as at once Son of 
Man and Son of God. It is to yield Him the 
grateful adoration of our hearts. It is to trust 
with unbounded assurance in His power. His wis- 
dom and His love. It is to give ourselves with 
cordial self-surrender to His service. It is to ex- 
pect by His grace deliverance from sin and death, 
and exaltation by and by to His right hand. To 
believe on the Lord Jesus Christ is something more 
than to believe Him or even to believe in Him. It 
is to make His person and His work the basis of 
all our hopes, the object of all our affection, the 
inspiration of all our activity. 

And this He declares to be the work of God, the 
one great and comprehensive duty of man. If He 
is right, it is your first duty and mine. If we 
neglect it, we do so at our cost and at our peril. If 
we fail in it, we miss the true end and glory of life. 
It is the keystone of the arch of moral obligation. 
It is the condition on which alone it is possible for 
us to have the divine favor and blessing. On our 
doing this one thing, or not doing it, depends our 
destiny here and hereafter. 

This is the teaching of Jesus Himself, as it has 
been in later days the teaching of all who have 



The Work of God 85 

faithfully proclaimed His gospel. And yet, simple 
as it is, it is not without its difficulty for many 
thoughtful minds. It is, no doubt, in some re- 
spects easier to believe in Him to-day than when 
He was visibly present on earth. But there are 
some of us for whom it is not easy to admit the 
claims which He makes upon our confidence ; some 
who say that they cannot believe Him to have been 
the Son of God sent down from heaven. And 
then there are others who make the great confession 
very readily, and honestly, and heartily, but whose 
faith makes but little impression on their characters 
and lives. Is it then really, we are tempted to ask, 
so important ? Up to a certain point it is not diffi- 
cult to believe in Jesus Christ. All good men be- 
lieve in Him as a good man. All minds and hearts 
that are sensitive to moral beauty pay willing hom- 
age to His nobility of character. The most emi- 
nent name in history, the greatest benefactor of the 
human race, the world's ideal and in that sense the 
world's Saviour, we can readily admit Him to have 
been. But this believing on Him, in the sense in 
which He seems to require it of us, this unreserved 
acceptance of Him as the Son of God, this unlim- 
ited confidence in Him, this entire self-surrender to 
Him, — is it necessary, is it possible ? How can it 
be the first and greatest of all duties ? What right 
had He Himself to say that '^ this is the work of 
God''? 

I shall try to answer this question in one of the 



86 Life Indeed 

many ways in which it may be answered. The 
common answer to it is ^' Believe on the Lord Jesus 
Christ and thou shalt be saved." It is only be- 
cause of His sacrifice that we can be forgiven. It 
is only by His Holy Spirit, received into our hearts 
by faith, that we can be made pure and strong, be 
delivered from the power of sin and fitted for the 
heavenly blessedness. And that is true, if the 
word of God is true. It is the gospel in its sim- 
plest terms. 

But it is well for us at times to think of some of 
the things which are implied in such a thorough- 
going faith in Jesus Christ, and some of the effects 
which it produces, or, in other words, to consider 
the gospel in some of its wider relations, and to ob- 
serve what it does for those who really and truly 
accept it. 

To believe with all one^s heart and soul in Jesus 
Christ means then, for one thing, to believe that 
God may be known in terms of humanity. There 
are those who tell us that we cannot know Him at 
all. If there is anything back of the phenomena 
of nature besides a mysterious energy, we cannot 
find out what it is, and our minds soon become be- 
wildered when we try to conceive of a personal be- 
ing who is eternal and infinite. On the other hand, 
the popular notion of God is merely that of a mag- 
nified man, and it is sometimes said that man is a 
miniature of the Almighty. No wonder that many 
reverent minds revolt from the crude idea that the 



The Work of God 87 

Most High is '^ altogether such an one " as even the 
noblest of mankind, and take refuge in agnosticism. 
But if the measure of a man must not be applied to 
Him whom the heavens themselves cannot contain, 
there is still a likeness between His nature and ours. 
And the proof of this is not merely that Jesus spoke 
of Him as His Father and our Father, or that He 
regarded and treated all men as God's children. 
The proof is that God could and did become incar- 
nate in Him. He was certainly a man, bone of 
our bone and flesh of our flesh ; and another nature 
did not come and dwell in Him, side by side with 
the human nature which was so evident in all He 
said and did, so that there were in Him two per- 
sons, one divine, the other human. God simply 
poured Himself (if I may say so) into the humanity 
of Jesus and revealed Himself through it. He was 
at once and in one person man and God. Doubt- 
less in order that this might be possible, some of 
the divine attributes were laid aside. He ^' emptied 
Himself,'* as St. Paul says, ^'when He took the 
form of a slave and was made in the likeness of 
men." The fullness of the Godhead could not be 
brought within earthly limitations. '^ My Father," 
He declared, **is greater than I." But the essen- 
tial nature and character of God could be manifested 
in a human character and life. No man could re- 
veal His omnipotence, or His omniscience, or His 
omnipresence. But even a man might manifest 
His holiness, His justice and His love. And Jesus 



88 Life Indeed 

did exhibit these, and so taught us how we are to 
think of God. He that hath seen Him hath seen 
the Father. And we have seen Him, for He was 
made flesh and dwelt among us in the person of a 
man. I will not stop to speak of the new light 
which is shed on human nature by a fact like this. 
But I call upon you to consider that, while God is 
not a larger man, it is through a man that we gain 
our only real knowledge of Him. He is not un- 
knowable, for we have beheld His glory in the face 
of Jesus Christ. 

Then the second thing implied in a true belief in 
Christ is the belief that God is love. For that is 
what Christ was. It was in love that He came 
into this world. It was in love that He gave Him- 
self to the ministry on which the Father had sent 
Him. It was in love that He sought and tried to 
save those who were sunk in ignorance and sin. It 
was in love that He taught and toiled. It was in 
the fullness of His love that He died upon the cross. 
A more loving heart than that of the Son of God 
has never been known on earth. He loved God. 
He loved truth. He loved righteousness. He 
loved unlovely and sinful men and women. This 
was, as anybody can see, the chief trait of His 
character. This was the impelling motive in all 
His activity. It is what made Him so pitiful. It 
is what made Him so patient. It is what made 
Him so untiring in His efforts to do good. It is 
what made Him so self-forgetful and so self-sacri- 



The Work of God 89 

ficing. Listen to Him as He speaks, on the hill- 
side, in the streets, on the shore, by Jacob's well, 
in the temple-courts, in the upper room. Watch 
Him as He sits at the Pharisee's table, or in the 
home at Bethany ; as He stands by the bedside of 
the daughter of Jairus, or before Lazarus' grave ; 
as He moves about from place to place, teaching, 
comforting, healing the sick, raising up the fallen ; 
as He kneels in the garden, stands at last before 
Pilate, expires on the cross. What love ! What 
boundless love ! Did He utter burning words of 
indignation in regard to the Scribes and Pharisees ? 
It was because of His love for those whom they de- 
ceived and oppressed. Did He seize a whip of 
small cords and drive the tradesmen from the tem- 
ple ? It was because of His love for God whose 
worship they profaned. Did He depict in language 
of terrible import the certain consequences of sin ? 
It was because in His great love He longed to save 
men from them. Did He warn those who heard 
Him of a sin that hath never forgiveness ? It was 
because even infinite love can save no man against 
His will. Surely the apostle spoke advisedly when 
he spoke of the love of Christ as ^^ passing knowl- 
edge." 

Well then, such also is the character of God. 
He is love; not power, nor justice, nor holiness, 
but love. So He also feels toward the children of 
men — feels toward each of us who are His children. 
He loves us just as Jesus loved ; too well to let us 



90 Life Indeed 

sin with impunity ; too well to suffer us to perish, 
if it is possible to save us ; so well that there is 
nothing which He will not do for us, if we are will- 
ing to trust and love and obey Him. In His laws 
and in His judgments even, we can hear the beat- 
ing of His heart of love. And in all our trials 
and sorrows we can lay our heads on it and be at 
rest. 

A third truth which is implied in a profound be- 
lief in Christ is that of the supreme importance of 
character. It was certainly the one thing for 
which He cared. He was wholly indifferent to 
wealth and honor, to social rank and public ad- 
miration. He had a tender sympathy for physical 
suffering, but His miracles of healing seem to have 
been chiefly wrought for the sake of the moral and 
spiritual help which they so vividly symbolized, or 
for which they opened the way. Not from pain 
but from sin did He long to save men ; not from 
the things that kill the body but from those that de- 
stroy the soul. He was not a social reformer, as 
the work of a reformer is commonly understood 
and carried on. He did not attack the social cus- 
toms of the day, or seek to readjust the relations 
of classes, or even touch in His discourses on the 
grave political issues w^hich led so soon afterward to 
the utter destruction of the Hebrew nationality. 
His teaching all bore on the reformation of personal 
character. He strove to make men pure and 
peaceable and forgiving and true and kind and lov- 



The Work of God 91 

ing. This is the kingdom of heaven, He said, that 
a man should love God with all his heart and 
should love his neighbor as himself. And He 
taught this by His example as well as by His ser- 
mons and His parables. 

Now there is such a thing as a belief in Christ 
which makes no deep mark on a man's own per- 
sonal character and allows him to remain strangely 
indifferent to the specific duties on which the Mas- 
ter so strongly insisted. But it is not such a faith 
as that of which I am now speaking, and it is of 
very little practical value. A real belief in Him 
must lead any one of us to set the matter of char- 
acter far above everything else. It is fatally easy 
to fancy that faith in Christ may be a substitute for 
right living ; that one may be mean and selfish and 
dishonest and impure and almost anything else that 
is contemptible, and cover it all from the sight of 
God and men by membership in the Church or by 
some showy form of religious activity. There can 
be no doubt as to the way in which Jesus Himself 
would treat Christians of this kind. He would say 
to them, '^Woe unto you, hypocrites!'' A man 
simply cannot be His disciple without being in the 
first place absolutely sincere, and without feeling to 
the very depths of his soul that nothing else what- 
ever is so important, so beautiful, so worthy of 
most earnest and patient pursuit, as a character 
like that of Christ Himself, strong, pure, free, gen- 
erous, self-denying, intent on doing God's will, de- 



92 Life Indeed 

voted to the promotion of truth and righteousness 
and happiness among men. 

The latent possibiUties of human nature — that is 
another thing which every man must beheve in, 
who truly believes in the Lord Jesus Christ. He 
Himself beUeved in men. ^^He knew/' as John 
tells us,^' He knew what is in man/' the evil and 
the good alike, and yet He believed in man. He 
believed that every man was worth saving, that 
every man might be saved. He knew, of course, 
that there were some men who would not be saved, 
but it was because they would not receive the di- 
vine gift that was offered them. He saw in every 
human being the nature which He had Himself as- 
sumed, and He sought to win all, of every rank 
and class and moral condition, for the kingdom of 
heaven. This was indeed one of the most novel 
and surprising features of His work — the univer- 
sality of the invitation which He Himself uttered 
and commissioned His apostles to utter. It was, 
'^ If any man thirst, let him come unto Me. Come 
unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy laden.'* 
And He declared that if He were ** lifted up. He 
would draw all men unto Himself." This spirit of 
hope, and of hope even for the least and lowest of 
mankind, was absolutely new in the world. Who 
was this young Jew that He should conceive 
schemes so vast and think that even publicans and 
harlots had immortal souls ? He was the Son of 
God. He knew God as well as man. And He 



The Work of God 93 

actually lifted on His faith and on His love the en- 
tire human race to higher destinies. 

He taught us who believe in Him to think very 
poorly of ourselves in some respects. We are not 
what we ought to be, nor what we might be. But 
there is no one of us who is not a child of God 
and (if he will) an heir of heaven. Before the 
most insignificant of us open boundless spheres of 
growth and happiness and usefulness. And what 
is true of us is no less true of the very meanest and 
most debased of our fellow-men. If we believe in 
Christ, that is what we believe in regard to our- 
selves and every member of the race to which we 
belong. Nothing so precious as a human soul ! 
No human soul beyond the reach of God's love 
and care, or of His renewing and sanctifying 
Spirit ! There is hope for all mankind, if Christ 
was right in His estimate of men, and if He was 
Himself what we believe Him to have been. 

I ought not to say " If He was what we believe 
Him to have been.'' I should rather say, if He is 
what we believe Him to be. For He is the same 
yesterday and to-day and forever, the same on the 
throne of glory and power as when He walked the 
streets of Jerusalem or the highways of Judea and 
Galilee. Nay, He has never left this world, for 
whose redemption He lived and died. He is still 
present in it, in the person of His Holy Spirit. 
He is present in every assembly of His followers. 
He is present with each individual soul that trusts 



94 Life Indeed 

and loves and tries to serve Him. He is present in 
all our labors and struggles, all our joys and sor- 
rows, present with us wherever we may be called to 
toil for Him, present with us whenever and wher- 
ever we may be called to die. '^When one re- 
marked on David Livingstone's loneliness in Africa, 
he answered that he was not alone. ' Christ said 
that He would be with me always. It is the word 
of a gentleman of the strictest honor, and there's an 
end of it.' When he fell upon his knees in an 
African hut (says Dr. McKenzie), and threw his 
arms forward on the couch, and rested his head 
upon them, he believed that the promise was kept. 
The candle burned low at his side, and his heart 
ceased to beat, but he knew that he was not alone." 
He who was with His servant there, is with His 
servants everywhere. And He is guiding them in 
their work, and making it successful. If it were not 
so, they might well shrink from many of the tasks 
in which they are engaged. He sets before them 
open doors. He sweeps obstacles out of their way. 
He rules among and over the nations, as well as 
over and in His Church, so that '^nothing — abso- 
lutely nothing — comes to pass either in heaven or on 
earth without His divine will." We do not believe 
in a dead and buried Christ, but in an ever-living, 
ever-present Saviour and King. 

And therefore we believe in the future progress 
of the human race. We believe in a better day 
that is coming. We believe that the kingdom of 



The Work of God 95 

heaven will at last conquer and fill the world. Not 
because of tendencies which we observe in human 
nature, nor because of natural forces now at work 
in society ; but because it was to redeem and save 
the world that Christ came down into it from 
heaven, and because it is for this great end that He 
is working still. We have His own word for it. 
We have the continual evidence of His gracious 
and mighty activity. And we know that the pur- 
pose of God in the incarnation, the crucifixion, the 
resurrection of His Son cannot be changed or de- 
feated. We are optimists and enthusiasts — we who 
believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. How can we 
help it ? Can it be for a moment supposed that 
His redeeming work will fail, that only a handful 
out of earth's myriads will be at last gathered into 
the kingdom of heaven, and that He who is infinite 
in power and pity will be satisfied with that ? No, 
the time must come when all men shall know Him, 
and worship Him, and rejoice in Him, and the 
whole earth shall be full of His praise. 

It is impossible to gather into a few paragraphs 
all that is properly included in a hearty and intelli- 
gent belief in Christ. But let me enumerate the 
few points that I have now touched upon : It means 
believing that there is a natural kinship between 
man and God, so that from that which is highest 
and best in ourselves we know something at least 
of what He must be. It means believing that His 
nature and His name is love. It means believing 



96 Life Indeed 

that nothing in the world is so important as char- 
acter. It means believing in the divine capacities 
that are latent in every human soul. It means be- 
lieving that the Lord of all power and grace is still 
alive, and is still working in and for the world. 
And it means believing that at last the whole round 
world will be brought to His feet. It is a grand 
creed — is it not? — uplifting, inspiring, enlarging 
the mind, rejoicing the heart. But it is what I be- 
lieve, and what you believe, if we really believe in 
the Lord Jesus Christ. 

And now what effect must such a faith have upon 
one who is truly possessed by it ? It will make 
him, for one thing, profoundly reverent toward 
God. God gains nothing from distance or mystery. 
The nearer He comes to us, the more clearly He 
makes Himself known to us, the more glorious does 
He appear. But at the same time, beholding His 
glory as we do in the face of Jesus Christ, we know 
that we may trust Him utterly. Love cannot al- 
ways be trusted, unless it is combined, as it is in 
Him, with equal wisdom, righteousness and power. 
But God*s love may be trusted, even when His 
dealings with us are most mysterious. It cannot 
fail. It cannot err. It will have its way. And 
then any one who has even begun to know that 
love, as it is revealed in Jesus Christ, will find the 
first of the two great commandments easy to obey. 
He cannot help loving God with all his heart. 
Love does not always awaken love, but dull and 



The Work of God 97 

hard must be the heart which can beUeve in Jesus 
and not love Him. It is impossible. Faith and 
love cannot be separated. Faith works by love, as 
the apostle says, and in its eager thankfulness the 
loving soul pours forth its praise in word and deed. 
It finds songs even in the night. It fills the dark- 
ness with the music of resignation and trust. The 
light of heaven shines on and through its tears, and 
grief and disappointment cannot rob it of its deep 
and sacred joy. And then it is always looking for 
new opportunities of service. Do you believe on 
the Lord Jesus Christ ? Then you will want to do 
something for Him. You will have a strong de- 
sire to be like Him in character. You will long to 
have other people far and near know Him and love 
Him as you do. If you only half believe in Him, 
you may not feel in this way. You may think that 
you are safe, and think no further about it. This 
is, alas ! all that the faith of some people amounts 
to. A mere opinion, a mere spasm of emotion now 
and then, a mere confession ^'from the teeth out- 
ward '* — it is no faith at all ! A real, heartfelt be- 
lief in Christ will inevitably have the effects of 
which I have been speaking. It will make a man 
over. It will make all things new to Him. It will 
give him new views of God and man, of life and 
death; new aims, new purposes, new desires and 
hopes, a new feeling toward his fellow-men, a new 
spirit and temper in everything he does. It will 
make him love and seek what is true and good, and 



98 Life Indeed 

hate what is false and low and selfish. I say a gen- 
uine and hearty faith in Christ cannot but have this 
effect. A little faith, a faith that merely gives him 
a false sense of security, may do him positive harm. 
Such a faith as Christ demands, as He deserves, 
and as He inspires in one who is thoroughly in 
earnest, will make him such a man as God approves 
and loves. 

And this is why Jesus could say that it is the 
work of God that we should believe on Him ; that 
it is what God would have us do, and is all that 
He requires of us. It leads to everything else that 
is worth being and doing. It is simpler perhaps, 
as I have already suggested, to say, ^' Be not afraid, 
only believe, and thou shalt be saved.*' But we 
need to get down to the realities which underlie 
these familiar and momentous words. And this is 
the gospel in its amazing height and breadth and 
its magnificence of moral power. I pray you re- 
ceive it into your minds and hearts. Let it mould 
and sway and inspire and exalt your daily lives. 
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, believe on Him 
as you believe that you are here alive to-day ! 
Nothing else is so true as His words, nothing else 
so noble as His character, nothing else so certain 
as that He is the Lord of the world. Other things 
may pass away, but His kingdom cannot fail. A 
little while and we shall have vanished from the 
earth, but His truth shall abide unchangeable for- 
ever. There is no other name so great as His in 



The Work of God 99 

all the universe. And according as we have be- 
lieved, or have not believed, on Him, will be our 
endless destiny. O my dear friends, believe in 
God, believe in goodness, believe in your own im- 
mortal souls, believe in the divine love, believe in 
the final triumph of righteousness, believe in the 
Lord Jesus Christ; ^^that He may dwell in your 
hearts by faith, and that ye being rooted and 
grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with 
all saints what is the length and breadth and depth 
and height ; and to know the love of Christ which 
passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled unto all 
the fullness of God.'' 



PUTTING ON CHRIST 



But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ. — Romans 
xiii. 14. 



VI 

PUTTING ON CHRIST 

A PHRASE SO Striking as this merits attention, 
especially as it is twice used by St. Paul. The 
figure of speech embodied in it is many times em- 
ployed in the Scriptures : it was a favorite one with 
this apostle, and it is not infrequently found in clas- 
sical writers. We recognize its appropriateness and 
feel its poetical beauty when Job says, for example, 
*^I put on righteousness and it clothed me,'' or 
when Isaiah sings, ** Awake, awake, put on strength, 
O arm of the Lord," or when Ezekiel prophesies, 
'^ The princes of the sea shall come down from 
their thrones, and lay away their robes and put off 
their broidered garments, and they shall clothe 
themselves with trembling." So the promise of 
our Lord to His disciples, as He was about finally 
to leave them, was that they should ^^be clothed 
with power from on high." In all these passages 
there is nothing foreign to our modern modes of 
expression. Neither is there anything strange in 
the language of St. Paul, when he exhorts the 
Roman Christians, in view of the fact that ^'the 
night is far spent and the day is at hand," to " cast 
off the works of darkness and put on the armor of 
light " ; or the Thessalonians to ^^ put on the breast- 
103 



104 Life Indeed 

plate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope 
of salvation ^ * ; or the Ephesians to ' ' put on the 
whole armor of God/' It is interesting to ob- 
serve how the martial life of the cities where he 
wrote affected the form of his thought and sug- 
gested the imagery which he employed. And so 
again when he urged his brethren at Colosse to 
put on various virtues, such as a heart of com- 
passion, kindness, humility, meekness, long-suffer- 
ing, and over all these, like a large outer garment, 
to put on love ; or when he says to the Corinthians 
that the corruptible body must put on incorruption 
and the mortal must put on immortality, he is still 
speaking as we ourselves might speak; such ex- 
pressions might be met with in a writer of the pres- 
ent day. But we begin to feel the strain which his 
thought is putting upon his language, to feel that 
he is crowding into words more meaning almost 
than they can hold, when we hear him speaking of 
the human spirit as ^^ clothed upon with its house 
which is from heaven,'' or, as in two different 
epistles, of ^* putting off the old man," and *^ put- 
ting on the new man," as if one could change his 
nature as he changes his garments. But the climax 
in his use of this strong metaphor is reached, when 
summing up in one compact phrase all that he would 
say, as if it were impossible, as it really is, to ex- 
press his whole meaning more tersely, clearly, or 
forcibly, he says, '*Put on Christ. Clothe your- 
selves anew with Him. Let your souls be wrapped 



Putting on Christ 105 

up in Him, as in a garment. Wear Him as a 
celestial panoply, a true armor of light, through 
the battle of life. It is not enough to be clad, 
like God^s servant of old, in any righteousness of 
your own. It is not enough to throw around you 
any separate graces of character. There is only 
one thing to strive for, only one thing to do ; it is 
to put on the Lord Jesus Christ.'* 

Such language as this is not unparalleled in 
ancient writers, but it would sound strangely if we 
were to speak thus of putting on Plato or Aristotle, 
Bacon or Stuart Mill, Emerson or Herbert Spencer. 
And if the expression were allowed and were in- 
telligible, it would still mean much less than St. 
Paul means when he speaks of putting on the Son 
of God. I want, if I can, to lead you a little way 
into his meaning, and then to urge you to do the 
thing which he enjoins. 

I have referred to two passages in which the 
apostle uses the same words, but he does not use 
them in the two places with precisely the same idea. 
The other one is in the Epistle to the Galatians 
(iii. 27), where he speaks of this as a thing already 
done. ^'As many of you,'' he says, ^^as were 
baptized into Christ, did put on Christ." But 
here, in the Romans, he speaks of it as something 
which those who were long since baptized are to be 
all the time engaged in doing. Let us try, first of 
all, to get hold of this distinction. 

It will be plain enough if we consider for a mo- 



106 Life Indeed 

ment what baptism signified to those to whom he 
was writing. It was the rite of initiation into the 
new society which Jesus had founded. That was, 
so to speak, its human side. But it had also a far 
deeper significance than this, even on its human 
side. It meant that those who received it began a 
wholly new life. They ceased to be heathens, and 
they became Christians. They broke free from 
their own past, as well as separated themselves from 
the society around them. Of course they aban- 
doned their old religious beliefs and all their idola- 
trous forms of worship. But they also withdrew 
from many of the associations in which they had 
formerly been held. All their views of things were 
altered, of God and man, of life and death, of 
pleasure and pain, of duty and destiny. The pro- 
found change which had taken place in their intel- 
lectual convictions brought with it a corresponding 
change in their outward lives. They came out 
from the corrupt society in which they had been 
born, and formed at once a community apart. All 
things literally had become new to them ; it was as 
if they had entered into another world. How 
great the change must have been, may readily be 
seen, if you will think what it means for a Hindu 
in India or a Mussulman in Turkey to become a 
Christian in our day. It was not merely a change 
of opinion on certain subjects, or a change of con- 
duct in certain particulars. It was the renunciation 
of all that one had believed and loved and lived 



Putting on Christ 107 

for, and the beginning of life anew. When a 
Gentile convert went down into the water of bap- 
tism, it was, as St. Paul says, as if he went down 
into his grave, and he rose from it another man. 
And this new man was a man to whom Jesus Christ 
was everything. 

Thus for him henceforward Christ was the source 
from which he derived his knowledge of the truth. 
When an ordinary Greek or Roman of the time of 
St. Paul desired to know the truth on any subject, 
outside of matters of daily experience, he went, if he 
was a scholar, to the philosophers; if he was a 
plain man he went to the priests, or he took the 
current popular opinion, or he gave up the quest in 
despair. When he became a Christian, he went to 
Christ or to those who could repeat and explain to 
him the words of Christ. His only question was, 
^^What has Christ said about this?" and every 
utterance of Christ was for him the final truth. On 
His promises he rested with an absolute confidence, 
and he received every declaration that had come 
from His lips as being the very word of God. He 
put his mind, as it were, into the keeping of Christ, 
and made Him Master of his thought. 

And so of his conduct. The law of Christ was 
his supreme law. The usage of the day justified 
many things which Christ had forbidden. No 
matter ; it was Christ who was to be obeyed. The 
law of the state forbade certain things which 
Christ had commanded. No matter ; he would go 



108 Life Indeed 

to the dungeon or the arena, but he would not dis- 
obey Christ. He felt that he belonged to Christ 
and not to himself. He stood in the lowly rela- 
tion of a slave to One whose authority over him 
was absolute and perfect. His supreme purpose 
was to honor and serve his divine Master, and he 
felt that nothing could ever release him from the 
obligation to live and to die for Him. The very 
name of Christian that he bore, was the badge of 
his voluntary and honorable servitude. 

And then when he became a follower of Christ, 
he clothed himself, as it were, not only with his 
Master's thought and will, but also with His 
righteousness. What righteousness was to a Jew, 
we all know. It was to keep the letter of the 
Mosaic law. To a Greek or a Roman it was to 
obey his own conscience as well as he could, to be 
not less virtuous than his fellow-citizens and a great 
deal more virtuous than his gods. The whole con- 
ception of righteousness was changed by the gos- 
pel, and those who accepted its teachings saw at 
once that it was vain for them to hope to commend 
themselves to God by such obedience to His will as 
they were able to render, and they therefore sought 
by faith to cover their sins with the perfect righteous- 
ness of Christ. Over their polluted souls they 
sought to throw that spotless mantle. They were 
taught that they were guilty before God, and could 
base no claim to His acceptance on the deeds that 
they had done or tried to do. But they put on the 



Putting on Christ 109 

righteousness of their Master and Redeemer as a 
white, unsullied robe. 

This, I say, was the relation of the first Christian 
believers — converts from heathenism, most of them, 
whether among the mountains of Galatia or in the 
great cities of the Empire, — this was their relation 
to the Lord in whom they trusted. They con- 
fessed it when they were baptized. And this is 
what St. Paul meant when he wrote to them, ^^ As 
many of you as were baptized into Christ did then 
put on Christ.'* <^ You renounced what you had 
formerly believed and trusted in and lived for. 
You died to the ideas and practices of your old 
heathen life, and began a new life in Christ. You 
divested yourselves of your former principles and 
habits, and you put on, instead of them, the mind, 
the will, the righteousness of Christ.'* 

Now this is not precisely true of us in this age 
and in this country. No such complete and 
striking change has ever taken place in us, simply 
because we are not converts from heathenism. It 
may have taken place in others around us who 
were brought up in heathenism, though they have 
always lived under the shadow of our churches and 
at the threshold of our doors. But even this is 
hardly possible, because Christianity is now in all 
the air ; it is in the very blood of all civilized men. 
We at all events have always been Christians, and 
we are more Christian than we know or are per- 
haps willing to admit. Many of the teachings of 



110 Life Indeed 

Christ are now commonplaces of our thought. 
Many of the precepts of Christ are wrought into the 
laws of the land and into the unwritten laws by 
which all society is governed. In this sense we 
have never put on Christ. He was born in us 
when we were born, and has been wrought into us, 
as our education has gone forward. Still less did 
any such radical change take place in us at our 
baptism, for, unlike the believers to whom St. Paul 
wrote, we were baptized in our infancy, and the 
faith, if faith there was, was that of others, not 
our own. 

And yet, if we have ever confirmed that bap- 
tismal vow, if we have ever taken our places 
among Christ* s people and have declared ourselves 
His followers, we have done precisely that which 
the apostle here describes. We may not have had 
as much to put off as the earliest Christians, but 
we have had just as much to put on, and we have 
put it on. We put on Christ when we stood be- 
fore men and confessed that Christ was our Mas- 
ter. We meant that He was then and thencefor- 
ward Master of our thought. We did not profess 
that we would stop thinking or learning, or that we 
would accept nothing as true which had not the 
stamp of His authority upon it, or which lay out- 
side the range of His teaching. But we meant that 
we would receive His declarations, on every sub- 
ject of which He spoke, as to the character and 
will and purposes of God, as to His own nature 



Putting on Christ 111 

and office, as to the nature and condition and 
destiny of man, his need of forgiveness and of 
moral renewal, his duty of repentance and faith 
and self-surrender to God, as the exact and eternal 
truth. We received these declarations, whether or 
not we could fully understand them, whether or 
not they perfectly accorded with our accustomed 
opinions or wdth the opinions of other men. We 
surveyed the whole realm of truth and each par- 
ticular portion of it, from the point of view of one 
to whom the greatest and truest of all truths is that 
of the incarnation of God in Christ. This is what 
it is to be a Christian thinker, and this is what we 
became, when we became followers of Christ. 

Then we accepted also the yoke of His authority 
as the Lord of our conduct. We gave ourselves 
up to His service, we made His commandments 
the law of our living. What the Galatians did in 
the time of St. Paul, what every converted heathen 
does now, in receiving the sacrament of baptism, 
that each of us has done who has declared himself 
to be a Christian. We have not only professed our 
intention to comply with the precepts and to ex- 
hibit the spirit of Christ, as these have become ele- 
ments of decorous and graceful living. As much 
as that every decent man must do, who lives in a 
Christian community. But there has been the def- 
inite surrender of our personal choice, desire, will, 
to our divine Master, and the cheerful acceptance 
of His blessed will in place of our own. We put 



112 Life Indeed 

off our selfish ambition, and we put on a temper of 
submission to Christ. 

And then, thirdly, we put off our self-righteous- 
ness and put on the righteousness of Christ. Not 
that we then gave up the endeavor to do right. O, 
far from that ! Then it was that we first began to 
feel such a desire to do right as we had never felt 
before, to hunger and thirst after a righteousness 
such as we had not yet attained. There was 
awakened within us a deep, strong longing to be 
like Christ, to be worthy of Him, to be fit to ap- 
pear in His presence. But then, realizing also our 
sinfulness and weakness, we felt that we could be 
acceptable in the sight of God, only as the mantle 
of Christ's perfect righteousness was thrown around 
us, hiding all our imperfections and our sins. We 
hoped to be justified (that is the scriptural word) 
not because of what we do or what we are, but be- 
cause of what Christ did, and because of what He 
was and is. By a simple act of self-oifering faith 
we hid ourselves as it were in Christ. We clothed 
our shrinking, sin-stained souls in the white robe of 
His holiness. 

This is what it is to ''put on Christ," by a sin- 
gle, decisive, voluntary act. And it is well for 
those of us who bear His name and who hope 
in His grace, to consider what we have already 
done, what we did, many of us, years ago. If we 
have to-day any hope of God's mercy, it is not be- 
cause of the lives we are living, but because we 



Putting on Christ 113 

have put on the righteousness of Christ. Let us 
feel, then, our utter unworthiness, and empty our 
hearts of all foolish pride, while we realize and 
confess our entire dependence upon the grace that 
is in Christ Jesus. And then let us remember that 
we are committed to His service. We have pledged 
ourselves to obey Him. We have accepted Him 
as our Master. The world has no authority over 
us ; to Him alone we stand or fall, and He is able 
to make us stand. O let us not forget that the 
yoke of Christ, when once put on, can never be 
put off, and that each of us, who have accepted the 
rule of Christ, owes to Him the same patient, un- 
wearied, complete devotion, which the slave owes 
to his master, which the subject owes to his king. 
And, thirdly, what right have we who are Chris- 
tians, to suffer our minds to be disturbed on any 
subject on which we have the authority of Christ ? 
How shall we doubt or deny, w^hen He has spoken ? 
How shall we dispute His word ? How shall we 
distrust His promises ? Heaven and earth may pass 
away, but no word of His can ever pass. It is not 
for me to urge those of you who are already His 
followers, in this sense of the words, to '^put on 
the Lord Jesus Christ.'* But I exhort you to re- 
member that you have long ago done so, and to 
keep ever in mind, and to make your thought and 
conduct accord with, this close and beautiful 
relation of dependence and of service, that He 
may be to you what He was to His first disciples, 



114: Life Indeed 

all in all — the beginning and the end of your re- 
ligion. 

But there are some of you, probably, who do not 
stand in this relation. You are to some extent 
Christians. Yes ; I presume there are no heathen 
here. But you are Christians because you cannot 
help it, because you were born in this country and 
in this age of the world. Or you are Christians 
because it is the decent and proper thing to obey 
some of Christ's commandments, and to show some- 
thing of His spirit. But you are not Christians in 
the true sense of the word, till you have done what 
I have now been describing, — till you have '^put 
on Christ.'' And till then you not only have no 
right to hope for the favor of Christ in the life to 
come, you have not even begun to know the joy 
and glory of life on earth. You are all adrift on an 
ocean of uncertainty, if you do not accept Him as 
a divine teacher. You are at the mercy of your 
own ignorance and of your own passions, if you do 
not let Him rule your conduct. And O, how will 
you dare to appear before the all-seeing eye of God, 
if your frailties and your sins are not covered up 
by something better than such a righteousness as 
yours ? Do not tell me that, so far as you can see, 
many of those who call themselves Christians have 
not put on Christ to any very great degree. I 
know it; I know it. It is the scandal and the 
shame of Christendom. But after all, the truest, 
noblest, happiest life is a life in Christ. And there 



Putting on Christ 115 

is no other sure foundation for the hope of blessed- 
ness hereafter than that which is laid in Him. 
This is no longer a proposition to be proved. It is 
the declaration of the word of God. It is the testi- 
mony of an illustrious and increasing company, 
from the days of the apostles to our own. And 
this — and nothing else — is what it is to become a 
real Christian. It is to make the mind and will 
and righteousness of Christ your own. It is to 
clothe yourself with Christ. One simple act of 
self-surrender, and it is done ! 

But if this is so, why did St. Paul write to the 
Roman Christians, exhorting them still to put on 
Christ ? Had they not been baptized into Him like 
the Galatians ? Or had they so fallen away that 
they needed to be converted over again ? Ah ! 
but we have not yet got at the full meaning of this 
deep phrase. There still remained for them, and 
there still remains for us, the long, hard, necessary 
task of putting on the character of Christ. And 
that is what St. Paul refers to in the text. Without 
it everything may be begun, but nothing is finished. 
The foundation is laid. Now let the perfect build- 
ing rise upon it ! 

And this, my Christian friends, is the one thing 
that we have to do, — to put on the character of 
Christ. A man may go and live for many years in 
a foreign country. He may engage in business 
there, may learn its language, submit to its laws, 
and adopt many of its customs ; he may even be- 



116 Life Indeed 

come a citizen of it, and earn a right to its pro- 
tection. And yet he may never enter at all into 
the real life of its people, may take no true interest 
in its prosperity, may cherish toward it no genuine 
loyalty, but remain to the end as much a foreigner 
as he was at the beginning. Or one may be a 
member of a Christian church, he may attend its 
services and behave with entire propriety, may suf- 
fer his name to stand on its roll, may make his 
little contribution when the plate is passed, and 
pay his pew-rent with prompt regularity. But he 
may still have, and may even desire to have, no 
share in the real life of the Church ; its spirit is 
not in him, he takes no part in its work, and its 
services perhaps do him about as much good as 
they do to the rafters of its roof or to the carpet 
on its floor. And so a man may be a Christian — 
yes, we cannot deny it, he may be a genuine 
Christian; he may have put on the Lord Jesus 
Christ in the sense thus far explained, and to such 
an extent as to cherish a comfortable hope of his 
final salvation, who has caught very little of the 
spirit of Christ, and exhibits a character very dif- 
ferent from that of his Master. The world does 
not want such Christians as these. They are 
simple obstacles in the way of Christianity. And 
such Christians we do not want to be. We want 
with the faith of Christ to put on the character of 
Christ. His purity, for example. His utter and 
absolute aversion to evil. We do not want the 



Putting on Christ 117 

spirit which says, *^ Pardon thy servant in this 
thing/' or that thing, or which does the thing and 
asks no pardon, because it deems Christ's standard 
of moraHty too high. We want a character that 
will not tamper with evil, but will fearlessly do 
right at whatever cost. Then the gentleness of 
Christ. His purity was not of that kind which 
makes a man hard in his judgments, and repels 
those whom it ought to attract. *' Separate from 
sinners," and yet the best friend that sinners ever 
had, always working for them, always winning 
them to Him, always doing them good — that is 
what He was, and that is what we ought to be. 
The constant sense of spiritual things was another 
trait of His character which we too should strive 
to put on. The world around Him was not so 
bright as it is around us, but no earthly splendor 
could have blinded His eyes to the heavenly vision 
which was before Him all the time. And what we 
need, beyond almost anything else, is to realize the 
nearness to us of the unseen realms, so that in- 
fluences from them may govern our lives, and that 
the truth which relates to them may be to us both 
motive and consolation. The self-denying love of 
Christ for men, — if we have not something of it, 
we are not worthy of Him. If we are not willing 
to sacrifice anything of our wealth, our comfort, our 
present advantage, for the sake of those whom He 
died to save, how can we call ourselves His dis- 
ciples ? Surely we need to put on more of this. 



118 Life Indeed 

We need to show it in our daily life, in our homes, 
in our business, in our relations to the Church of 
God, if we are to make on our fellow-men any- 
thing like the same impression of character, which 
was made by the Lord whose example we profess to 
be copying. And so of His meekness, His patient 
forbearance. His pity for every form of suffering, 
His perfect sincerity. His utter indifference to hu- 
man applause as compared with the favor of His 
Father in heaven. I cannot enumerate all the 
traits of His character, but there is not one of 
them which one who desires to be truly His fol- 
lower will not strive to put on. And yet, after all, 
what we need to do is not to seek to adorn our- 
selves with these separate graces, as one might tie a 
handful of roses to a dead stem. The true way is 
to put on, not the characteristics of Christ, but 
Christ Himself; to get His real spirit into our 
souls, and then these several graces will soon make 
themselves manifest, as a tree which is truly alive 
will burst of itself into a perfect dome of bloom, 
when it is touched by the summer sun. 

And this is Christianity, its secret, its power, its 
divine, undying beauty. It is Christ, first, last, 
and midst, and without end. And it is Christ not 
only on the page of the world's history, not only 
on the artist's glowing canvas, not only exalted to 
the right hand of God, but Christ incarnate again 
in every Christian. It is the hiding of human in- 
firmities and passions, not only from the eye of 



Putting on Christ 119 

God by the cloak of Christ's righteousness, but 
even from the eyes of men by the radiant garment 
of His character. Just as fast and as far as men 
put on the character of Christ, just so fast and so 
far will Christianity move onward irresistibly. 
That which hinders it now is simply that those who 
represent Him in the world are so unlike Him, that 
you and I, among others, who owe to Him what 
we most highly prize, who look to Him for what 
we most ardently desire, have so little of His 
spirit and are so contented to remain the poor, im- 
perfect Christians that we are. O, let us awake, 
arise, and put on, more and more, the Lord Jesus 
Christ ! 

Then two things will happen. In the first place, 
those around us will feel the power of His religion 
as they have never yet felt it. It is not by sermons 
that the world is to be saved ; sermons enough 
have been preached to save it twice over ; nor by 
the printed Bible, translated into every language 
of the globe ; nor merely by the silent, mysterious 
influence of the Holy Spirit. It is by the pure, 
earnest, unworldly, self-sacrificing lives of men 
and women, who have not only put on Christ, but 
in whom as a living energy He dwells. If that 
were true of His people anywhere, the whole 
community around them would be stirred, as we 
are told that the city of Capernaum was moved at 
the coming of the Lord Himself. 

And finally, for them at least heaven would al- 



120 Life Indeed 

ready have begun. For this is heaven — to be like 
Him. Not golden streets and crystal seas and sap- 
phire walls and gates of pearl ! It does not mat- 
ter where we are ; everything turns on what we 
are. If we are of the earth, earthy, then there 
can be no heaven for us. But if we bear the 
heavenly image, then heaven is around us and 
within us now, '' Beloved, now are we the sons of 
God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be 
hereafter. But we know that when He shall ap- 
pear, we shall be like Him." We know that, and 
to know that is enough. It is to have the assur- 
ance of eternal life. 



THE PRACTICAL MAN'S MISTAKES 



Where there is no vision ^ the people perish, — 
Prov. xxix. 1 8. 



VII 

THE PRACTICAL MAN'S MISTAKES 

There is a man whom everybody knows, and 
whom many people admire, though I am persuaded 
that he commonly receives more respect than he 
deserves. He has been a pew-holder in many dif- 
ferent churches. He has however attended them 
rather from the force of habit, or because he has 
thought it to be for his social advantage, than be- 
cause he has any particular sympathy with the 
preaching, or much respect for the work in which 
the Church is chiefly engaged. He is a familiar 
figure in Wall Street, and is noted for his keenness 
and shrewdness, his energy and industry. He has 
great confidence in himself, and is commonly suc- 
cessful in his commercial schemes. He is very 
careful to keep all sentiment out of his business, 
and sometimes seems harsh and even cruel toward 
those with whom he deals. But it is considered 
safe to trust his judgment, and he is seldom de- 
ceived through an over-confidence in other men. 
He is a member of various boards of administra- 
tion, and his influence in these is not friendly to 
large undertakings, but commonly favors a cautious, 
economical, and conservative policy. He is inter- 
ested in politics, local and national, and here he 
123 



124 Life Indeed 

invariably votes with his party. He is a firm be- 
liever in the regular organization, and approves, 
upon the whole, of the methods by which partisan 
success is secured. He is not, indeed, blind to 
certain abuses and evils connected with these, but 
he regards them as inevitable, and he says that as 
men are actually constituted, a high degree of po- 
litical morality is an illusive dream. 

I say that everybody knows this man. For I am 
not speaking of an individual, I am speaking of a 
type. The figure which I wish to set before your 
eyes is that of the so-called ^' practical man.*' He 
is the man who prides himself on his freedom from 
illusions. He sees things as they are. He has 
been trained in the school of experience. He has 
a clear and exact knowledge of other men. He 
understands the conditions under which the work 
of the world is carried on. He has a very definite 
notion as to that which is possible, and that which 
it is absurd to attempt. He has measured the mo- 
tives by which men are governed, and discerned 
the objects on which their hearts are really set. He 
is therefore never carried away by enthusiasm. 
Nothing can tempt him to engage in a quixotic en- 
terprise. The rule of his life is that only those 
ends are worth seeking which one has good reason 
to believe that he can finally attain. He holds 
that in everything a prudent man will observe a 
just proportion between his efforts and his aims. 

There is no one for whom the practical man has 



The Practical Man's Mistakes 125 

a greater contempt than for the idealist or the vi- 
sionary ; and he makes no distinction between the 
two. There is, however, a very important distinc- 
tion between them. The visionary is the man who 
is aiming at things that are obviously impracticable, 
like building a bridge across the ocean or a railway 
to the moon ; his schemes are idle and fanciful ; 
his brain is unbalanced, so that he mistakes dreams 
for reahties, and in his fantastic and illogical con- 
duct shows that he lacks common sense. Such a 
man is to be pitied rather than despised, but no in- 
telligent person can either trust or greatly respect 
him. 

The idealist, on the other hand, is distinguished 
from the so-called practical man, not so much by 
the methods that he adopts as by the ends that he 
aims at. And these, again, are different, not so 
much in kind as in degree. They are those ob- 
jects of pursuit which are highest and best. He 
does not ask what is expedient, but what is right ; 
not what is agreeable, but what is true. His desire 
is to know the truth, and to act in conformity 
with it. His endeavor is to do right, and to make 
other people do right. And his standard of that 
which is right and true is not the prevailing senti- 
ment of the day, but the judgment of an enlight- 
ened conscience, a clear understanding, a lofty and 
pure imagination. He is not satisfied for himself 
to aim at anything lower than absolute righteous- 
ness and truth; and so far as his relations with 



126 Life Indeed 

other men are concerned, he would bring them and 
hold them to the same standard. This is the 
idealist, and you see at once how widely he differs 
in his way of looking at things from the practical 
man. And the practical man has a supreme con- 
tempt for him. 

This is one reason at least why he has so little 
respect for the Church. It is composed of ideal- 
ists. The worst of these are its ministers. Utterly 
ignorant of actual life, with a purely scholastic con- 
ception of human nature, living in retirement from 
the arena on which other men are struggling, and 
having no faintest conception of the temptations to 
which they are exposed and the real motives by 
which they are governed, the minister of the gospel 
is engaged in presenting ideals of character which 
he himself does not attain, and which nobody else 
can hope to attain in this life. His judgment in 
practical matters is worth nothing, and no intelli- 
gent man will pay much attention to anything he 
says. It is quite true, of course, that he gets these 
ideals and principles and standards of character 
out of the Bible, but the Bible is an ideal book, 
and the practical man has little use for it. It is a 
curious product of the ancient and oriental mind, 
but it is not adapted to the present day. The sys- 
tem of religion contained in it has an evident charm 
for dreamy and poetic natures, and its doctrines 
and principles might do very well in an ideal 
world ; but in the actual condition of human so- 



The Practical Man's Mistakes 127 

ciety, the morality enjoined in the Bible is wholly 
impracticable ; and the representations found in 
the New Testament of things beyond our sight and 
reach are too indefinite and uncertain to occupy the 
attention of a man who is governed by reason and 
who sees things as they are. 

Then the work which the Church has undertaken 
to do is partly unnecessary and partly preposterous. 
What more visionary enterprise, for example, have 
men ever engaged in than that of foreign missions 
— the attempt to convert the whole world to Chris- 
tianity ! One might as well try to transform all the 
trees of the forest into cedars or palms. If the 
Church were concerned with that which is practi- 
cal, it would confine its attention to the heathen at 
home. And yet what it has attempted to do for 
these is not what they really need. It is trying to 
make converts of them, to get their names upon its 
rolls, and lead them to declare themselves Chris- 
tians. What it ought to be doing is to improve the 
sanitary and social conditions under which they 
are living, to relieve their poverty and distress, to 
provide them with proper food and clothing, and 
set them in the way of greater physical comfort ; 
and their spiritual welfare can be taken in hand by 
and by. 

And if the practical man does not approve of the 
work which the Church is trying to do, he has also 
very little respect for the thorough sincerity of 
those who compose the Church. They are indeed 



128 Life Indeed 

idealists in theory, but in point of fact, he says, they 
are just like other people. These extravagant 
notions, these lofty standards and aims, — they do 
not carry them into their business, and for the very 
good reason that all business is impossible on any 
such basis. ^^And you know it,*' he says, '^ you 
who call yourselves Christians ! You know that a 
man cannot be honest and true, in the ideal sense 
of those words, and be successful in mercantile 
life at the present day. You are therefore simply 
adding hypocrisy to your other failures and sins. 
You might far better lay aside such extravagant 
pretensions, and let your religion, like mine, con- 
sist in doing about right, in doing as well as you 
can, in view of the conditions in which you are 
placed.*' 

So, too, as to politics. Nothing is more absurd 
than the notion that the political life of this city or 
country, at the present day, can be raised to an 
ideal level. You have to take men as you find 
them and do the best you can with them. You 
must have an elaborate organization, or everything 
will be in confusion. And such an organization 
must deal with men as they are. If you want 
votes, you must pay for them, either in bank-bills 
or in offices. A great deal of hard and disagreeable 
work must be done, and done by those who are not 
influenced by patriotic and unselfish motives. Many 
of the most useful men of the party are men who 
are morally corrupt. But their services cannot on 



The Practical Man's Mistakes 129 

this account be dispensed with. And they are 
really no worse than multitudes of those who com- 
pose the community itself. The idea of an admin- 
istration in which the public offices shall be held by 
men who administer them only for the public good, 
is the dream of an idle idealism. We want prac- 
tical methods which will give us practical results. 

I cannot undertake to exhibit in detail the work- 
ing of such a man's mind, but I am sure that you 
will recognize from this rapid sketch a type of char- 
acter very common among us. There have always 
been such men. They are the natural product of a 
keen, commercial, and competitive age. They 
command a certain amount of admiration. They 
exert a wide and deplorable influence. For, after 
all, ideals exist. They are natural to all of us. 
They commonly have, in our earlier years, great 
vividness and beauty. They exercise a command- 
ing power over us until they are shattered, or until 
we voluntarily abandon them. And in consider- 
ing the contrast between one who is inspired and 
governed by them and one who is not, it is worth 
while for us to observe two or three serious mistakes 
which are made by the practical man. 

The first is that of underestimating human nature. 
Men are sordid, indeed, and selfish and cunning, 
often treacherous and often false. But the earth 
would long since have become a mere den of wild 
beasts, if it were not for the nobler impulses which 
are also natural to them. If you judge them by 



130 Life Indeed 

what you see of them in the daily intercourse of 
life, you are apt to form a very poor opinion of 
them, especially if their narrowness, their greed, or 
their obstinacy baffles you in your plans. It is 
impossible to mingle with them without having this 
baser side of their nature often thrust upon your 
notice. And yet they are really better than they 
often seem to be. And to deny the existence of a 
pure disinterestedness, a genuine honor, a true 
nobility of spirit among those whom we call the 
masses of mankind, is to commit one of the greatest 
errors into which it is possible to fall. There are 
reserves, as it were, in human nature, of heroism 
and self-sacrifice and high aspiration, which are 
always latent in men's souls, and are often mag- 
nificently revealed in their action. To imagine 
that they are not there because they do not show 
themselves to us all the time, is as if one were to 
deny the reality of those prodigious fires that are 
slumbering in the heart of the earth because every 
day is not marked by a volcanic eruption, or to assert 
that there is no electricity in the atmosphere because 
the roll of the thunder is not constantly heard. 
One sometimes brings disaster on himself by 
excessive confidence in the honor, truthfulness, and 
high-mindedness of others. But he who goes to 
the opposite extreme, and adopts the old Latin 
maxim that every man should be presumed to be a 
wolf until you find out that he is not, makes a 
practical mistake whose consequences are more 



The Practical Man's Mistakes 131 

serious still. A man who has his own ideals, and 
believes that others also have theirs, who is not 
afraid to trust them, who boldly appeals to them in 
the interest of that which is noble and true, shows 
a clearer perception of what they really are, than 
your practical man who thinks he knows them so 
well. I do not say that this view of human nature 
is more attractive than the other. I say that the 
candid observation of life and the careful study of 
history show it to be more accurate also. The 
practical man professes to have great respect for 
facts, and the fact is that men in general are a great 
deal better than he believes them to be. 

This is his first mistake. The second is that by 
his repudiation of what he calls idealism, he de- 
prives himself of the power to do much for his 
fellow-men. You might suppose, that with the long 
attention he has given to the conditions of success- 
ful work, and with his clear understanding of 
human deficiencies and wants, he would be just the 
man to help forward the work of moral and social 
reform ; the man who would be most certain not to 
waste his strength ; the man to whom others would 
go, with the assurance that they would receive from 
him the most judicious counsel and the most effective 
aid. But the trouble with him is that he lacks the 
motive which must be behind every real effort for 
the moral improvement of others. He has no strong 
faith in human nature. He has no large conception 
of what it may become. He has no hope of any 



132 Life Indeed 

considerable improvement in its actual condition ; 
and consequently he lacks all enthusiasm, and even 
boasts of his lack of it. But it requires a great 
energy to induce any one to labor persistently, and 
to enable him to labor successfully, for the welfare 
of others. It involves a vast amount of self-sacri- 
fice ; it requires a prodigious deal of patience. It 
will not be done by any one who has not within 
himself an inexhaustible spring of courage and hope. 
All these the man of ideals has. And they sustain 
him under discouragement. They inspire him with 
a hope that never fails and a zeal that never flags. 
It is a fact of history which cannot be questioned 
that all the men who have really helped forward in 
any large way the progress of the human race have 
been idealists and enthusiasts. The practical man 
stands by and criticises and sneers. They labor 
and suffer and die. And he is forgotten. And 
they are immortal. In a certain sense he was 
right. The things they strove for were impossible. 
But their faith and enthusiasm have accomplished 
the impossible, as faith and enthusiasm are always 
doing and will do to the end of time. 

Then, again, in the third place, the practical 
man who has dethroned his own ideals, and who 
treats the ideals of others as an empty superstition, 
makes the serious mistake of dooming himself to 
inevitable deterioration. It has been well said that 
**if there is one lesson more than another which 
history has to teach, it is this : that without fidelity 



The Practical Man's Mistakes 133 

to unrealized ideals, there can be no solid advance- 
ment in any department of life. And the secret of 
all retrograde experiences, whether in individuals 
or in nations, is to be found in their loss of those 
spiritual elements in man which have hitherto 
lighted and fed the torch of civilization. No 
greater misfortune can possibly happen to a man or 
to a nation than that which arises from meagre am- 
bitions and a cramped and petty outlook. It is not 
always gross and sensual things by which they are 
degraded. It is enough that they should be im- 
mersed in things mundane and material, given over 
to the brittle gods of an unideal life, to the lust of 
wealth, the love of ease and self-indulgence, to the 
things that are below the level of the house-tops, 
rather than to those which dwell among the stars.'* 
This process of deterioration is subtle and slow, 
but it inevitably takes place in one who has re- 
nounced his ideals and has become a worshiper of 
that, and that alone, which lies within the horizon 
of his actual vision. No one can remain stationary 
in his moral and spiritual life, any more than a star 
can stand still in its orbit. He will go forward or 
backward, upward or downward, as he is led on by 
high ideals, or suffers himself to be pulled down by 
earthly views and sensuous passions. Emerson's 
quaint phrase, '* Hitch your wagon to a star," has 
in it a great truth. The world, with its low stand- 
ards, its fierce competitions, its glittering rewards, 
is certain to enchant and enchain the mind that is 



134 Life Indeed 

not always peering into the invisible and reaching 
forth toward the ideal. There is but a step be- 
tween what is often called a practical view of things 
and utter cynicism and misanthropy. Even if our 
ideals were mere phantasms, the power to form and 
the disposition to pursue them would be our only 
salvation from the pessimism which is infecting like 
an Asiatic plague so many spirits in our time. But 
it can never be that an illusion is better than the 
truth. And the reason why a man who insults the 
ideal inevitably goes down, is that he has com- 
mitted sacrilege against the truth ; he has insulted 
human nature ; and he pays the penalty of his sin 
by being forced downward to the level on which he 
falsely imagined that other men were living. 

And then, once more, he who takes such views 
of life, and regulates his conduct by them, cuts 
himself off from sympathy with all the noblest and 
best of mankind. There have been cynics hereto- 
fore in every age, — men who scoffed at the ideal ; 
who measured their fellow-men by the standard of 
their own miserable ideas and aspirations; men 
without faith in humanity, or in a God whose abso- 
lute righteousness and truth are reflected back, how- 
ever imperfectly, from the character of the highest 
creature He has made. There have always been 
such men. But the great mass of mankind, cer- 
tainly the great leaders of mankind, have been men 
of ideals. All the progress which the race has 
made, from the grey dawn of its history down to 



The Practical Man's Mistakes 135 

the present day, has been the result of its often 
Wind but still persistent endeavor to reach an ever- 
receding goal. Men have never been content with 
the knowledge, the power, the comfort, or even the 
moral excellence, which they have at any moment 
attained. They have always been reaching out and 
pressing on toward something higher and better, 
toward an ideal, in other words, imperfectly con- 
ceived, perhaps, and never actually realized, but 
ever drawing them upward with an irresistible 
power. Here is the secret of the progress that has 
thus far been made in individual character, in so- 
cial refinement and purity, in civil liberty and 
order. The ideal of what a, man should be, of 
what society should be, of what the state should 
be, has always floated before men's minds, not like 
a phantom of their own crude imagination, but like 
an angel flashing upon them out of some higher 
sphere. It is often saddening to study the wayward 
and halting course by which they have struggled 
onward to the point at which they stand to-day ; 
but there is also something magnificent in the sight 
of this irrepressible and splendid effort to rise out 
of actual conditions of ignorance and suffering, of 
confusion and wrong, into something nearer the 
ideal of personal and public happiness and virtue. 

And now the man who says that all this is merely 
chasing a will-o'-the-wisp, that it is better to rest 
content with things as they are, that anything like a 
thoroughgoing reform in personal character or in 



136 Life Indeed 

the life of society is an idle dream, — such a man 
simply steps aside out of the ranks, while the march 
of humanity goes on. He has no share in it. He 
has no sympathy with it. He can do nothing to 
help it. But past him or over him it will go, till 
somewhere and at some time the vision is fulfilled, 
and the ideal so long cherished and so long sought 
is actually realized. 

For humanity sweeps onward ; where to-day the martyr 

stands, 
On the morrow crouches Judas, with the silver in his hands ; 
Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots 

burn. 
While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return 
To glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden urn. 

I submit to you, then, that it is the part of prac- 
tical wisdom to respect your ideals, to believe in 
them, to cherish them; for this is at least one 
secret of the highest happiness, the largest growth, 
the widest usefulness. Beware of the influences 
vv^hich would tend to persuade you that it is not 
worth while to expect or strive for anything really 
great and noble, either for yourself or others ; that 
you will always be substantially what you now are ; 
and that the world is destined to drift on forever, 
very much as it is doing now. Bewate of the per- 
nicious influence of those who tell you that in the 
realm of personal character, in society, and in the 
state, the evils which you observe and deplore can- 



The Practical Man's Mistakes 137 

not be remedied, that you must accept men and 
things as you find them, and put up with what you 
cannot help. It is not so. Not the practical man 
but the idealist holds the true philosophy of life. 
You need not always live, unless you choose to do 
so, on the low, malarial plains where you are now 
dwelling. The hills are all around you, calling you 
up to their wider vision and their purer air. What 
if you cannot reach the shining summits, or tarry 
there even if you should succeed in scaling them ? 
You can reach a higher level than that whereon you 
are standing now. The idealist is not of necessity 
an idiot. He does not for a moment suppose that 
absolute truth and absolute righteousness can be at- 
tained here in this imperfect and sinful world. But 
he will not for this reason cease to aspire after 
them, or to strive to come as near to them as he 
can. And in this he finds the glory of life and its 
unfailing inspiration. He finds his outlook broad- 
ened and his character strengthened and elevated, 
even though he has not reached, and knows that he 
will never reach in this life, the absolute ideal that 
he seeks. But he knows also that his security as 
well as his happiness lies in keeping it steadily in 
view. 

And if this is the dictate of practical wisdom, it 
certainly is the great lesson of the gospel. Reli- 
gion, as the practical man says, is concerned with 
ideals. Ideals so absolute, so glorious, as those 
which are contained in the gospel of the Lord 



138 Life Indeed 

Jesus Christ, can be found nowhere else. But 
here precisely is the secret of its power, not over the 
imagination only, but over the conscience and the 
heart. It appeals to our natural idealism. But 
instead of some vague conception of our own 
minds, it gives us a definite statement of God's 
thought and purpose for us. And it sets before us 
the highest and best of all possible ideals, embodied 
in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. No man 
can speak lightly of the ideal life, who believes in 
the Bible and tries to live according to it. For it 
is perfectly uncompromising in its demand that we 
shall be satisfied with nothing less than the persist- 
ent and determined endeavor to imitate the ex- 
ample and keep the commandments of our divine 
Master. If it required anything less than this, or 
if it confirmed us in our moral indifference or 
hopelessness, we should know that it was not from 
God. It would not meet our spiritual needs. It 
would have no power to renew and ennoble the 
secret sources of character. And therefore we who 
believe and rejoice in it as the word of God, are 
bound to manifest a spirit of loyalty to the highest 
ideals in everything we have to do, — in our daily 
conduct, in our domestic life, in our business, in 
our studies, in our various professions, in our obli- 
gations and our opportunities as citizens. Any- 
thing less than this involves disloyalty to Christ, 
disbelief in our own souls, unfaithfulness to our 
heavenly calling. We may not, we certainly shall 



The Practical Man's Mistakes 139 

not, in this life attain the shining mark on which 
our eyes are fixed. But if the word of God may- 
be trusted, we shall reach it hereafter, when at last 
we shall be like Him whom we have followed to 
the end. 



DIVINE RESTRAINTS 



And the Lord shut him in, — Genesis vii. i6. 



VIII 

DIVINE RESTRAINTS 

Much is said in the Bible of the freedom of the 
people of God. The unknown author of the one 
hundred and nineteenth Psalm rises out of the 
somewhat monotonous strain in which his poem is 
composed, into one of exultation and triumph, 
when he exclaims, '^ I shall walk at liberty, because 
I seek Thy precepts.'^ And the same inspiring 
word is often on the lips of the apostle to the Gen- 
tiles. ** Ye were called for freedom, '* he writes to 
the Galatians; **for freedom did Christ set us 
free.*' And in his letter to the Romans his deep 
and powerful argument seems to break into song, 
when he speaks of ** the glorious liberty of the chil- 
dren of God." Separated by several centuries 
from each other, living at different stages of the 
divine revelation, these two men were agreed in 
this : that the true freedom of man is in obedience 
to God. The psalmist was under the law, and re- 
joiced in it ; he found his liberty in obeying its 
precepts. The apostle rejoiced that the Mosaic 
law was abolished. It seemed to him a bondage, 
in comparison with the liberty which was gained 
by faith in Christ. And yet there is no contradic- 
tion between them. Each utters the best and 
143 



144 Life Indeed 

highest thought of his age. The truth which is 
common to both is that alienation from God and 
subjection to sin is a species of slavery, and that he 
only is free who is brought into right relations to 
his Maker. Such a man is free from the sense of 
wilful wrongdoing, and the condemnation which 
this implies — the reproaches of conscience, the just 
anger of God. He is free from fear concerning 
the future. He is free from the fetters of false mo- 
tives and evil habits and partial and erroneous 
judgments. He is free from bondage to the opin- 
ions, the flatteries, the threats of his fellow-men. 
He is free from subjection to the outward and vis- 
ible world, and is brought into relations of famil- 
iarity and of sympathy with the larger and more 
real world that is spiritual and unseen. Such a 
man is lifted above the accidents of life, above the 
passions, the prejudices and the narrow ambitions 
of his day ; he breathes a purer air, he looks out 
upon a wider horizon. His sense of freedom gives 
him a sense of power and a desire for a larger ac- 
tivity. And as he comes into more perfect har- 
mony with God, his spirit becomes more confident 
and buoyant and exultant, till at last it bursts all 
earthly limitations, and passes into the complete 
and immortal freedom of the sons of God on high. 
All this is true, but there are very few Christians 
who are not more distinctly sensible of the re- 
straints which God often imposes upon those who 
love and serve Him, than of the liberty to which 



Divine Restraints 145 

He has called them. Something of that sense of 
emancipation which seems to irradiate the language 
of psalmist and apostle, we too have doubtless felt ; 
and yet who of us can enter into the full meaning 
of their inspiring words and make them wholly his 
own ? And the reason for this is not merely that 
we are conscious that our obedience is still imper- 
fect and our faith wavering and weak, that we have 
not surrendered ourselves so completely as the one 
had done to the authority of the law, or the other 
to the loving persuasions of the gospel ; that our 
spiritual freedom is hampered because our spiritual 
vision is clouded and our spiritual life is languid. 
It is not that, though we may feel that that is sadly 
true. But God often seems to have shut us in, 
within limitations at which we chafe, by restraints 
which are as fetters on our enjoyment and our ac- 
tivity. We know well enough that it is wrong to 
murmur at them, but we are often distracted be- 
tween the desire to accept and submit to them, as 
His appointment for us, and the desire to break 
away from and rise above them, into the freedom 
of our heavenly calling. It may help us, therefore, 
if we consider some of these restraints, in order to 
see, if we can, what they are meant for and how 
we ought to regard them. 

But it is important, at the outset, to observe how 
often it is the man who has shut himself in, and not 
God who has imposed restraints upon him. We 
are continually building barriers around ourselves 



146 Life Indeed 

and then complaining that our freedom is abridged. 
We shut ourselves up, for example, within narrow 
views of truth, refusing to let our minds go forth 
and up to the full breadth and height of the di- 
vine revelation. It is sometimes the result of early 
education, which has fixed us in a certain concep- 
tion of the great facts and doctrines of the gospel, 
so that it never occurs to us to inquire whether the 
truth of God and of our relation to Him may not 
be vaster and grander than that which we hold. 
It may be that some other acute but contracted 
mind has forced its opinions upon us, and we con- 
tentedly accept them, without asking if, beyond 
the domain thus mapped out before us, there may 
not be other seas and continents, stretching away into 
the distance. It is simple ignorance sometimes, and 
sometimes indifference, and sometimes a voluntary 
and wilful refusal to lift up our eyes and behold the 
things which God is ready to reveal to our knowl- 
edge ; and sometimes it is a timid temper, a want 
of faith in the truth and in God ; or it is an un- 
willingness to be disturbed in opinions that have 
become familiar to us, and in prejudices that have 
grown so tough with age that we mistake them for 
principles ; it is some one of these habits of mind 
that shuts us up within a creed, which in spite of 
the truth that it contains, becom^es false because of 
the truth which it excludes. When shall we learn 
that truth is one, and that God has revealed Him- 
self in many ways? The astronomer catches on 



Divine Restraints 147 

the lens of his spectroscope a ray of sunlight ; he 
enumerates to you the chemical elements which he 
finds in the blazing and bubbling mass from which 
it streams, and he tells you that that is the way in 
which you are to think of the sun. And the poet 
sees it rise over the Alps, touching every crystal 
peak with a crimson glory and wakening the valleys 
into life and song, and it stirs his soul with the 
sentiment of worship, and he greets it with a hymn. 
And the explorer, lost amid the trackless expanse 
of the polar ice, waits for it through the long 
Arctic night, and to him it means health and hope, 
escape from the living tomb that encloses him, and 
restoration to the smiling and happy home that he 
has left. And so it is with truth — the truth of 
God's love, for example, the truth of Christ's 
atonement ; it is not the same thing to all men, but 
it is larger and grander and more many-sided than 
any man's conception of it. God pours it, as in 
floods of light around us, and calls upon us to 
come forth, out of the narrow views in which we 
have imprisoned our own minds, into a large lib- 
erty of thought. 

We suffer, in very much the same way, an un- 
necessary impoverishment in our spiritual life, be- 
cause we shut ourselves up within narrow ex- 
pectations. *' According to thy faith be it unto 
thee," is a far-reaching law. It is one of the laws 
which govern attainment and achievement in the 
secular world, where knowledge, wealth, influence, 



148 Life Indeed 

success of any kind, is in great measure propor- 
tioned to ambition and effort. The school-boy who 
thinks that he never can know much, never will 
know much. The man who never expects to suc- 
ceed, never succeeds. And the same thing is em- 
phatically true of the spiritual life. Why is it that 
our Christian enthusiasm is so feeble, and our 
Christian joy so small ; that we are conscious of so 
little progress in holiness, so little freedom and ex- 
hilaration in our communion with God ? It is not 
because He has condemned us to live as we are 
living, because there is nothing more in the Chris- 
tian experience than we have attained, or nothing 
more, at least, for us. There are still mounts of 
vision on which the human soul may stand transfig- 
ured, as Jesus stood on the summit of Tabor, while 
celestial forms fill all the air, and a divine compan- 
ionship and communion is realized, which is a 
prophecy of heaven. There are still high places 
of Christian experience, on which your soul and 
mine may walk with the jubilant and triumphant 
step of those who are enfolded in a divine protec- 
tion and upheld and guided by an almighty arm. 
And if we do not reach them, it is largely because 
we do not expect to reach them. They are not, we 
say, for us to tread. We are not contented where 
we are, or we are contented. In either case, we do 
not rise to higher things, because we do not expect 
to rise. Or we push into the indefinite future, into 
the last years of life on earth, or even, perhaps, into 



Divine Restraints 149 

the life beyond, the fulfilment of a hope which 
might be fulfilled at once. But the great possibili- 
ties of the Christian life are possibilities for every 
Christian. Not to a few only, but to all who are 
pure in heart, is it given to see God. Not to now 
and then one alone, but to all who abide in Christ, is 
the freedom which He has promised, granted. It 
is not He, who has shut us into our narrow, un- 
fruitful, joyless experience, but we who have not 
faith enough in Him, or love enough for Him, to 
come forth into a larger life. 

So again, in the third place, with Christian ac- 
tivity. There is nothing more common than to 
hear a man lament that He is doing and can do so 
little for Christ He is hedged in and hampered 
by a thousand restraints. He longs to break away 
from them and be free for some truly great and ef- 
fective work. But look more closely at these re- 
straints, my brother, and see if they are not such 
as you have fastened on yourself. Is there any- 
thing to hinder your doing God service — service of 
the grandest and noblest kind — except your simple 
unwillingness to assume the responsibilities, or to 
make the sacrifices, which it involves ? Is it not 
your love of your ease, or your absorbing interest 
in your business, which alone stands in the way of 
your religious activity ? Or is it not some morbid 
feeling of timidity or self-distrust, which you ought 
to break over, and which you would break over, if 
you were really as intent as you think you are on do- 



150 Life Indeed 

ing good ? Or is not the difficulty this, perhaps, that 
while you are waiting for a wider sphere, you are not 
yourself widening your sphere, by filling it full of 
acts of usefulness and love ? There is nothing in 
the world that grows like the opportunity of doing 
good. If you want to do more, do it, and the more 
you do, the more you will want to do. But do not 
at least cheat yourself with the delusion that God 
has shut you up to a life of inaction, when it is 
your own selfishness or your own worldliness which 
alone hinders your religious activity. 

But when this has been recognized, that the 
restraints at which we murmur are often those of 
our own making, then we must also go on to 
recognize the fact that God does often shut us in. 
He does this, for example, sometimes by the limi- 
tations of natural capacity which He has fixed for 
us. It is not possible for us, by the very constitu- 
tion of our minds, to take those broad and lofty 
views of truth which others find so satisfying or 
inspiring. A narrow creed may be the only one 
which we can firmly grasp and hold, and they who 
are tempted to blame us for this, should remember 
that it is not so much our fault as our infirmity. 
Or our natures are too cold to be easily kindled to " 
such a fervor of Christian feeling as that which 
others exhibit, and they should not forget that we 
may be as sincere and as earnest as they, while we 
are longing, perhaps, for an emotional experience 
of which we are simply incapable. So there are 



Divine Restraints 151 

forms of Christian activity for which we are not 
fitted, and however pure may be the motive with 
which we enter upon them, God has shut us up 
to failure in them by denying to us the natural gifts 
which alone insure success. It may, perhaps, seem 
strange that He should thus refuse to any man the 
clearest vision of truth, the highest intensity of feel- 
ing, to which he can aspire, and stranger still that 
He should suffer any faithful laborer in His service 
to miss the end for which he has toiled, because of 
some involuntary and unconscious defect of mind 
or of temperament, by which he is in advance con- 
demned to disappointment. But this is certainly 
one of the ways in which He shuts men in. 

Another is by the narrow conditions of their 
lives. I do not mean to speak of those — the 
almost innumerable multitude of men — who seem 
to be placed by the providence of God beyond the 
reach of every elevating influence; who are shut 
in by a deadly circle of associations and of cir- 
cumstances which make their ruin seem almost 
inevitable; who appear to have no possibility of 
escape. The frightful picture which the weird 
fancy of the novelist has painted and which haunts 
the imagination of the reader like a nightmare, of 
the prisoner who saw that the walls of his dungeon 
were slowly but steadily closing in upon him, 
causing him an agony of suspense which was even 
more horrible than the certain and terrible death 
that awaited him — it is not an image too vivid and 



152 Life Indeed 

appalling of the condition of thousands who are 
living and perishing around us. But it is not now 
of them that I would speak. The contrast of their 
dark and hopeless lives — blots upon our civilization, 
reproaches upon our Christianity — makes the mean- 
est and poorest of our lives seem large and rich and 
free. But just because of our wider outlook and 
our higher aspirations, we feel the restraints amid 
which we are placed. The petty cares of daily 
life, the crowding and conflicting duties with which 
our busy hours are filled, the anxieties and fears 
and responsibilities by which we are burdened and 
perplexed, — how they exhaust our energies and 
baflle our ambitions and fetter our spiritual freedom. 
We are not engaged in a mad race after wealth, we 
are simply fighting the great battle of existence. 
We are discharging as well as we can our duty to 
ourselves, to society, and to those who are de- 
pendent upon us. He who gave the command- 
ment, ^' Remember the Sabbath to keep it holy,*' — 
did He not say also, " Six days shalt thou labor 
and do all thy work**? And whatever the form 
or sphere of our labor may be, whether in court- 
room or counting-room or school-room, whether it 
is the care of vast financial interests, or the care of 
the sick, or the care of little children, whether it is 
a public service or a domestic service, it is a 
necessity imposed upon us in the providence of 
God, and we cannot escape it. It is true that a 
man*s life does not consist in the abundance of the 



Divine Restraints 153 

things that he possesses ; and yet much of the life 
of every man and of every woman must inevitably 
be occupied with things that have no evident reli- 
gious relations and that seem in their influence 
directly opposed to all religious activity and 
progress. We are shut in by the conditions of our 
physical and social life, and whether we chafe at 
its restraints or meekly submit to them, we cannot 
throw them off. 

And yet the busiest and most careworn life is free 
compared with that of one on whom some sore dis- 
aster has fallen. The invalid who is fastened for 
weeks and months to a bed of helplessness and 
pain, who is withdrawn from all wonted ministries 
of duty and affection, and made to be the object of 
the pity and care and anxiety of others, — how sud- 
denly and sadly life is narrowed for such a sufferer ! 
Nothing to do, but everything to bear ; the range 
of vision bounded by the walls of a single darkened 
room, which is like a prison to the restless soul ; 
the bright and eager faculties of mind arrested in 
their accustomed activity and set to preying on 
themselves, or clouded and weakened by the 
poison of disease, — what a sad, but what a com- 
mon experience it is of the way in which God shuts 
us in ! 

Is it possible that there can be any still closer 
restraints imposed by Him on the free human 
spirit ? Yes, the bonds of sorrow are even tighter 
and more galling than those of physical feebleness 



154 Life Indeed 

and pain. The body is vigorous and active ; it is 
the heart which is enchained. The shadows of 
a great grief have fallen upon you, and you are 
walking on in solitude and darkness. Between you 
and the living world, in which just now you were 
doing your work so easily and so well, there has 
risen an impenetrable mist, in which you are 
moving aimless and bewildered. You hear from 
beyond it the voices of your fellow- men, engaged in 
the free and joyous activity in which you so lately 
had your share, and they are calling you to come 
forth out of your sorrow into the liberty of thought 
and feeling that you have lost. But you cannot 
come out of it, and you would not if you could. 
There is a sacredness in such an isolation and 
seclusion, which you do not desire or dare to 
violate. It is the hand of God that has drawn 
these curtains of darkness around you, and you 
cannot but wait till He shall lift them and let in 
upon you the brightness of the day. 

Or, once more, the restraints which He imposes 
may be wholly within the sphere of our spiritual life. 
There are no outward restrictions on our liberty, 
but we are in bondage to doubt or fear or religious 
depression. Our faith is shaken in some cardinal 
point or doctrine of the gospel and we can do noth- 
ing until it is restored. Or the freshness of our 
Christian feeling has vanished, as the delicate and 
tender beauty of the morning is lost in the noon- 
day heat and glare. We used to know the joy of 



Divine Restraints 155 

God's salvation, the mysterious and ineffable sweet- 
ness of a loving fellowship with Christ. It was 
the glorious liberty of which the apostle speaks. 
But we have lost it, and now religion is to us a 
weary round of duties and a longing for a spiritual 
freedom, which would be like heaven itself, if we 
could only get it back. There are such periods in 
the lives of God's true children, when the luminous 
presence that had shone upon their path seems 
turned to darkness, and when the light has faded 
from the mercy-seat itself. 

Does it not sometimes seem, in view of these 
various ways in which God shuts His people in, as 
if there were no real freedom left for us on earth ? 
Who of us has not felt, as his life has gone for- 
ward, that the hand of God was laid upon him 
in the limitations of natural capacity by which he 
is encompassed, in the restrictive conditions of his 
life, in sickness or in sorrow, in religious doubt or 
desolation? Who of us has not felt himself 
checked, hampered, arrested even, in his spiritual 
activity and progress ? Is this, we may well ask, 
the freedom of God's children ? Is this the light 
and joy and liberty of faith ? 

Let me point you for an answer to the threefold 
purpose which even now we are able to discover, in 
these divinely imposed restraints, — the purpose 
which will grow still plainer to us, as it approaches 
its accomplishment. It is, for one thing, a purpose 
of protection. The story of the patriarch from 



156 Life Indeed 

whose biography the text is taken, may at least 
teach us that first lesson. The barriers by which 
God shuts us in, are often barriers by which He 
shuts out from us temptations to which we should 
certainly succumb. The necessity of labor is not 
a burden, it is a defence. The seclusion and help- 
lessness of sickness is not a chastisement, it is a 
safeguard. You say that the purely worldly cares 
with which your hands and brain are filled, are a 
hindrance to your spiritual growth. It may be so, 
but a life of idleness would hinder it far more. 
You say that your sickness has thwarted your plans 
of Christian usefulness. It may be so, but un- 
broken health and prosperity would have diverted 
you from them more effectually still. Your great 
affliction has shut you up to a life of melancholy 
and inaction. I grant it, but you were perhaps 
becoming too deeply immersed in a happiness 
which was purely of this world, and this has 
brought you face to face with the world to come. 
You say that your religious depression destroys all 
the zest and freedom of your efforts to do good. I 
admit and understand it, but you were perhaps be- 
coming too well satisfied with the good that you 
were doing, and too self-sufficient and self-confi- 
dent. You did not realize, you do not yet 
realize, perhaps, the dangers that were threatening 
you when God thus laid His hand upon you and 
in His mercy shut you in. 

Or His purpose in it may be one of discipline. 



Divine Restraints 157 

It almost certainly is so. Have you learned all the 
lessons of discipleship so well that you no longer 
need His training ? Perhaps it may be His design 
to teach you simply that you have not done this, 
that you are willing to trust and serve Him when 
He lets you roam at large, but are impatient and 
rebellious under His restraints. It may thus be 
something concerning yourself that you are to 
learn, or something new concerning Him, — the real 
weakness of the faith that you thought so strong, 
the irresoluteness of the purpose that you thought 
so steadfast, the insufficiency of the love that had 
led you to say, ^* Though I should die with Thee, 
or for Thee, I will not deny Thee; " or, on the 
other hand, the power of His presence in the soul 
to make the darkest hour radiant and the most 
heavily burdened spirit glad. He may wish to 
teach you the great lesson of duty, that all labor is 
to be made sacred, by being performed in a spirit 
of Christian devotion ; or the great lesson of trust, 
that our desires are in all things to be subjected to 
His will. But whatever the lesson may be, be sure 
of this, that He has a lesson to teach you, and that 
when you have learned it, He will bring you forth 
again into freedom and into peace. 

Or He may, in the third place, have a work 
for you to do, which can only be done under the 
very limitations which He has imposed. It is 
for you, perhaps, to teach others how meekly and 
joyfully these limitations may be borne. It is for 



158 Life Indeed 

you to show how fervent and pure and devout in 
spirit it is possible to remain amid all the stress of 
secular activity. It is for you to prove again to 
the world, what has been proved so often and yet 
is so often denied, that one may be diligent in his 
business and yet serve the Lord, or faithful in all 
the endless round of homely duties, and yet be 
spiritually minded and full of the gentleness of 
Christ. Or still again, it is for you to exhibit a 
cheerfulness which pain cannot subdue, a serenity 
which sorrow cannot disturb, a faith and zeal which 
only shine out more brightly through the doubts by 
which you are enveloped. The most honored and 
eminent witnesses for God are not they whose feet 
are set in large places and who walk with buoyant 
step in pleasant paths. They are those whom He 
has in His providence shut in to narrow spheres, to 
conditions of hardship and suffering, but who there 
exhibit a trust in Him that never wavers, and a 
fidelity to Him that never fails. 

Here, then, are the lessons, too obvious to be 
missed, too important to be disregarded, to which 
our meditation brings us. The first is that it is 
never for His own sake, but always for ours, that 
God shuts us in. Whether it be to save us from a 
peril by which we are threatened, or to teach us a 
lesson which it is well for us to learn, or to enable 
us to render the service which it is our highest 
privilege to render. His very restraints are forms of 
blessing. The limitations which we fasten on our- 



Divine Restraints 159 

selves through prejudice, indifference, or love of 
this world, are indeed sources of weakness. It is 
by them that we are held back from the growth that 
we long for, and from the activity and the happi- 
ness that God has designed for us. But let us not 
murmur at those which are imposed upon us by 
Him. The little valley, shut in among the hills, 
might better complain because it is not the level 
prairie which is bounded only by the sky. But has 
it not also its use and its beauty ? And into its 
quiet depths do not the same stars shine ? 

And the second thing is that freedom is found 
not in the absence of restraints, but in adjustment 
to them. There is indeed a liberty of the children 
of God, and it belongs to those about whom the 
cords of love and duty are most tightly wound. It 
does not need or seek a larger sphere than that 
which He has assigned it, but in that sphere it finds 
ample and harmonious movement, because it moves 
in accordance with His will. Its direction is up- 
ward, rather than outward, and that sphere is large 
enough for it which brings it into vital contact and 
communion with Him. The Christian soldier, who 
ranges over earth and sea, has not always the liberty 
of the captive, whose cell is illumined by the pres- 
ence in it of the Son of God. And the narrowest life 
is sometimes expanded till heaven itself is embraced 
within its horizon, when the spirit has learned to 
forget its fetters in loving and joyous fellowship 
with Christ. That is the liberty with which He 



160 Life Indeed 

makes free those to whom all privation and hard- 
ship are sweet, which hold them more closely to 
Him. 

And that is the prophecy of the still more per- 
fect freedom awaiting us hereafter. We sometimes 
think of the world to come as a sphere where all 
restraints shall be removed, and the soul shall be 
unhampered in its immortal career of happiness 
and progress. And so indeed it will be with the 
limitations of sense and time, of earthly toil, of 
sickness and sorrow, of fear and doubt and death. 
But the sweet restraints of love and of obedience, 
and of holy and delightful work, will be around us 
still. Our freedom will be a freedom from sin, but 
not from duty, from suffering, but not from service. 
But the bonds which now seem to us the fetters of 
servitude shall there be the symbols of citizenship, 
when the mortal discipline and peril shall be ended, 
and the celestial security and fruition begun. God 
make us patient and faithful here, and give us that 
freedom and that peace hereafter ! 



IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF JESUS 



But go your way, tell His disciples and Peter 
that He goeth before you into Galilee ; there shall 
ye see Him, as He said unto you, — Mark xvi. 7. 



IX 

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF JESUS 

No one can read what is sometimes called the 
gospel of the resurrection — the inspired but still 
imperfect narrative of the wonderful forty days, in 
which our Lord showed Himself alive after His 
passion — without observing the changed relation in 
which He stood to His disciples. Sometimes it 
seems as if nothing were altered. He sits and talks 
and even eats with them as before. He declares to 
them that though His body is possessed of new 
properties and powers, it is still the same body 
which was nailed to the cross and laid in the tomb. 
<^I am not a spirit,'* He said, ^^ but a real, living 
man. Handle Me, and see.'' It was when He 
was walking with them as of old, along the familiar 
path over Olivet toward Bethany, that in the midst 
of His discourse. He was taken up from the earth 
and a cloud received Him out of their sight. 

And yet evidently, also. He was not with them 
now as He was wont formerly to be. He was set 
free from the limitations of physical law by which 
He had been bound. He came and went, as a 
spirit might come and go, appearing when the doors 
were shut and then mysteriously vanishing away. 
There is something about Him which strangely 
163 



164 Life Indeed 

eludes us. He seems to be hovering upon the 
border which divides the sensible from the unseen 
world. 

An extremely suggestive illustration of this is 
given in the statement made by the angel to those 
who were early at the sepulchre. Recalling a 
promise that had been made by Jesus Himself be- 
fore His death, He said : ^' Go, tell His disciples 
and Peter [the particular mention of Peter is espe- 
cially noteworthy] that He goeth before you into 
Galilee ; there shall ye see Him, as He said unto 
you.*' The command which had made them His 
disciples was a command to follow Him, and they 
had literally obeyed it. They had left their boats 
and nets, the booths where they carried on their 
business, and even the towns and cities in which 
they had been living, and gone forth after Him 
wherever He led the way. They had walked with 
Him up and down the whole length of Palestine, 
from Nazareth to Jerusalem, from Jerusalem back 
to Nazareth, more than once. But it had com- 
monly been with Him. If they were His follow- 
ers, they were also His companions. He was al- 
ways in the midst of them. Sometimes, even. He 
had followed them, as when He sent them, or a 
part of them, onward before Him, either to pre- 
pare for His subsequent coming, or because it was 
His pleasure to go, after them, alone. Now, how- 
ever, all this was changed. He was to go before 
them into Galilee, and they were to follow Him 



In the Footsteps of Jesus 165 

thither, but it was not as a visible presence moving 
among them. They could not keep Him in sight 
as they made the long journey. The path He took 
they could not take. In other words, they were 
now to begin to walk by faith, following one whom 
they could not see. Nowhere, as they went along, 
could they catch sight of Him. His blessed feet 
were unstained by contact with the Judean roads 
and left no print upon them. He passed unseen 
among the throngs of Passover pilgrims who were 
returning northward to their homes, bearing the 
tidings of the strange events which had made the 
days just past so tragic and so memorable. And 
the disciples were bidden to follow Him in the be- 
lief that though they could not perceive Him, as 
they pursued their way, He would fulfill His prom- 
ise and manifest Himself to them when the familiar 
hills of Galilee were once more beneath their feet. 

Now the special thought suggested by this is that 
our blessed Master has gone and is still going be- 
fore us along the paths which we are called to take 
in life. We cannot, indeed, behold Him now, but 
over every step of the way in which we are mov- 
ing onward, He has really passed, and we shall see 
Him by and by, when we reach our journey's end. 
There is certainly great encouragement and comfort 
in the fact, when the way seems, as it so often does, 
lonely and wearisome. 

The journey of life ! There is something very 
impressive in the thought of it, when one reflects 



166 Life Indeed 

upon all that is involved in it, and traces it from its 
beginning to its remote and unknown end. What 
a mysterious, winding way it is, through desert and 
forest, over delectable mountains, perhaps, and per- 
haps across rude and stormy seas, through mist and 
darkness very often, and sometimes through bright, 
exhilarating airs, — a narrow way, with pitfalls and 
precipices on every hand, and the end coming no 
nearer, because it never ends ! It is ** a path which 
no bird knoweth, and which the vulture's eye hath 
not seen,'* — that over which the soul of every man 
is called to move, rising higher and higher toward 
the heavenly hills, or leading downward into dark 
and dreary realms of spiritual desolation and death. 
Well may we sometimes feel dismayed, as we sur- 
vey it, and ask ourselves, Is life a blessing after all ? 
How shall our souls be m.ade competent to bear the 
tremendous burden of their own destinies ? Who 
shall guide us so that we shall not stray ? Who 
shall keep our weak and timid feet steadfast in the 
right path ? 

It is a great question — the greatest of questions 
for a thoughtful mind, looking out upon the world 
into which it finds itself flung by an unseen and ir- 
resistible power. And the most cheering answer 
that can be given to it is in the words, " He goeth 
before you; follow Him." 

Let me remind you, in the first place, that the 
Lord Jesus Christ has gone before us through the 
round of daily cares and duties in which so much 



In the Footsteps of Jesus 167 

of life consists. It was not for nothing that He 
was born into the home of the Nazarene carpenter, 
and lived there quietly and unknown for thirty 
years. They were years of ripening and of prepa- 
ration, and the sacred record passes them in silence. 
We sometimes lose sight of them, while we fix our 
attention upon the short but crowded ministry that 
followed them. And yet I think that in some re- 
spects they bring Him, who is our divine example 
as well as our divine Redeemer, nearer to us, than 
the few months of public activity which were so 
resplendent with teaching and miracle, and which 
ended at the cross. For our life is made up (is it 
not ?) of homely duties and of little things. We 
fill no public stations. We are not called to be 
apostles. Our sphere is narrow, our opportunities 
are few. Our years are all silent years ; and it is 
here, in the dull routine of events that make no 
stir, and of work that comes to nothing great — it is 
here, if it is anywhere, that we need the power of 
an inspiring example and the assurance of a divine 
sympathy and aid. And precisely here it is that 
we may be daily following Jesus, for He has gone 
through all this before us. For thirty years the 
sun rose and set every day upon that Galilean vil- 
lage, and it saw no splendor of miracle surrounding 
Him who was by and by to catch the tempest on 
His word and send it back to the caverns out of 
which it had come forth. It saw only a gentle, 
faithful, patient human life, employed in such tasks 



168 Life Indeed 

as others were engaged in — the lowly labor of a 
small mountain town. There can be in your daily 
life or mine no humbler or homelier duties than 
those which for so many years engaged the daily 
thought and care of Him who was at once the Son 
of Man and the Son of God. The weariness from 
which we so often suffer, the consciousness of pow- 
ers unemployed or only half employed, the restless- 
ness that torments us under the limitations by which 
we are hedged in, do you not suppose that He also 
knew them, as the uneventful years moved round, 
and the sense of His great mission burned more 
and more brightly in His soul ? Think of it, when 
you are inclined to fret under the duties which 
every day requires of you, and the burdens which 
the night, even, does not lift from your heart. You 
are simply walking in the path in which the Lord 
has gone before. 

But our lives have their crises also, their great 
decisive experiences, when important interests de- 
pend upon the decision of a moment, when our 
own fate or the fate of others hangs on our action 
or on our failure to act. At such a time the bur- 
den of responsibility or anxiety which is upon us 
may be almost overwhelming, and the contents of 
many years may be crowded into a few hours. 
Measure life not by its duration but by its intensity, 
and many a young man has outlived whole genera- 
tions. These are the experiences which test men, 
coming when they are not looked for, and lifting 



In the Footsteps of Jesus 169 

one into heroism or dashing character and reputa- 
tion into irretrievable ruin. They came to Jesus 
also, and you know how He met them: calmly, 
bravely, with His heart resting upon God, with 
His eye fixed upon the future. I do not say that 
to Him they were unforseen, as they so often are 
to us. But there was in Him an energy of faith, a 
resoluteness of purpose, which is a better safeguard 
in moments of suspense than any power to antici- 
pate that which is to come. This power does not 
belong to us. The other may be ours. No man 
can tell when the emergency may be upon him, or 
what its issue is to be. But there can certainly 
come to us no trials of faith or constancy or cour- 
age or meek endurance which are worthy to be 
compared with those through which the Lord has 
gone before us. If He walked on the loftiest 
heights of human life, He also sounded its deepest 
depths. His human nature was not more perfect 
than His human experience, passing from that 
which is lowliest to that which is grandest both in 
achievement and in endurance. If He asks us to 
follow Him in the one. He asks us only to follow 
Him in the other. 

So, too, He has gone before us in the conflict 
with temptation. Yes, He condescended even to 
that. One might have expected that if God was 
to come into the world, making His glory visible 
to mortal eyes, it would be in such a way that evil 
would flee away before Him, as darkness vanishes 



170 Life Indeed 

before the sun. How could it be possible for Him 
to feel its fierce and deadly assault ? How could 
it seize Him with a grip so strong that it required 
an almost superhuman effort to shake it off? It 
was possible only because He took our nature upon 
Him so completely, even to its capacity of being 
tempted to sin. He did not sin. He conquered 
where we are all beaten. But He knew the tre- 
mendous strain which we all know so well. Not 
once only, as we are apt to imagine when we read 
or speak of The Temptation, but through all His 
life He carried on the conflict, in which we too are 
all the while engaged. Here is the explanation of 
the nights spent in prayer upon the mountains. 
Here is the secret of the mysterious scene in the 
shadow of the olives of Gethsemane. And if we 
would estimate the strength of the temptations 
which He endured, we must measure the malignity 
of the powers of darkness, toward one who seemed 
about to overcome them, and who did overcome 
them and break their reign on earth. But you, O 
tempted soul, who are trying hard to stand your 
ground against the same principalities and powers 
of evil, and who are bruised and wounded in the 
tremendous struggle— remember that even the Son 
of God has gone before you through the same life- 
long battle; that even for Him it was not wholly 
ended till He cried, ^^It is finished,'' and breathed 
out His spirit into the hands of God. Remember 
that He who has now become our high-priest for- 



In the Footsteps of Jesus 171 

ever, is still touched with the sense of our infirmi- 
ties, because He was tempted in all points as we 
are now tempted every day. 

You will certainly anticipate me in thinking of 
sorrow, as another of the universal experiences of 
life through which the Lord has gone before us. 
There are elements of sorrow which He cannot 
have known by any actual experience of them. 
He who made no mistake, and who committed no 
sin, can have felt no self-reproach. He preached 
repentance to others, but He had Himself nothing 
to repent of. The sorrow that springs from the 
sense of shame, He often witnessed, but He did 
not feel it. Or rather, He did feel it all, just as 
He felt the weight of sins which He had not com- 
mitted, because by His divine sympathy He entered 
so perfectly into the actual life of humanity and 
made it all His own. It was not the burden of His 
own guilt, but of the world's guilt, which crushed 
Him in the garden and on the cross, and He has 
borne on His strong and loving heart the burden 
of the whole world's sorrow. He has gone before 
you, O sad and suffering heart, through the valley 
of tears in whose deep shadows you are walking, 
and you are only following Him. We sometimes 
look, in the midst of our grief and desolation, for 
something just like it in the life of our Lord, and 
we say, '^How can He know precisely my sorrow, 
when His experience was so different from mine ? ' ' 
Ah ! it is not that. Your experience is His, be- 



172 Life Indeed 

cause His infinite nature comprehends yours, as the 
ocean comprehends each several drop in the vast 
volume of its waters. And not only sorrow like 
yours, but your very sorrow — He has taken it upon 
Himself, in His divine compassion and love. Go 
forward, then, with patient steps, saying : 

" Not as I will," because the One 
Who loved us first and best has gone 
Before us on the road, and still 
For us must all His love fulfill, 

" Not as we will." 

And then, not through life alone are we literally 
to follow Christ — through its more common and 
more critical experiences, its conflicts with tempta- 
tion, its endurance of sorrow ; He has also gone 
before us through death. Through death — it is 
His resurrection which has taught us to use these 
words. Into death, the world has said before. 
Generation after generation had gone down into 
the grave, as shattered ships go down into the sea, 
and it had closed over them, and all was still again. 
It was an insatiable and a bottomless abyss. What 
was beyond it ? Was anything beyond it ? Who 
could say? Into that silence and that darkness 
the Lord of life and light descended. He also 
was laid in the tomb, and they rolled a great stone 
to the door of the sepulchre and sealed it and left 
it. But that was not the end. There is something 
beyond the grave, and out of the shadowy world — 



In the Footsteps of Jesus 173 

shadowy only because our sight is so dim — He 
who had gone thither before us comes back and 
speaks to us again. He does not promise to us or 
to any of us immunity from physical death. That 
is not a curse, it is a blessing. It is rest for the 
weary hand and brain and heart. It is freedom 
for the imprisoned soul. But He says tons, *^I 
have gone before you through it; follow Me.'* 
^' He that believeth on Me shall never really die.'* 
So it is that the darkest of all paths is brightened, 
and the deepest of all mysteries dispelled. We 
need not fear to follow where He has passed. 
What if the way is lonely when it goes out beyond 
the little space over which our vision ranges? 
What if we shrink with natural recoil from new 
and untried conditions of existence? Lo, He has 
gone before us through the grave itself. And for 
us to die is but to follow Him. 

^* There shall ye see Him," added the angel, 
^^as He Himself said unto you." And the prom- 
ise was fulfilled. They did not find Him where 
they sought Him, in the sepulchre ; but among the 
hills of Galilee, on the shore of the lake where 
they had so often walked together. He made 
Himself visible to them again. It is an inspiring 
prophecy and promise to all who follow Him in 
faith. It is no sign that He is not near us that we 
cannot behold Him now. But the perfect and re- 
warding vision of the Lord will not be ours till we 
have gained the heavenly hills, and looked forth 



174 X.ife Indeed 

upon the crystal sea. There at last the way will 
end, and we shall be with Him forever. It was, 
after all, only a vanishing glimpse of the Master 
which rewarded the obedient faith of the disciples. 
The presence, which was manifested to them, was 
soon again taken from them, and they were left to 
walk once more by faith. But there will be no 
further separation from Him for those who have 
followed Him into the other world. There at last 
we shall behold Him as He is, and the great re- 
ward of all our earthly struggle, the final fruition 
of our hopes, the full satisfaction of our souls, 
which this world can never yield, will be attained, 
when we shall there be with Him forever. 

But now in speaking thus of the way over which 
our Lord has passed before us, through life and 
through death, I would not forget, or have you fail 
to remember, the other thought, which I suggested 
at the outset, that He is still going before us, and 
that we have only to follow Him, through every 
difficult service and every dark path. It is not 
merely true that He once moved across the earth 
on which we live, leaving a line of light behind 
Him, and then vanished into the world unseen. 
That is not the gospel of the resurrection, or the 
great truth of Christianity. He is still moving 
among men and before them, as when He then 
went onward, in advance of the disciples, from 
Judea into Galilee. He goes before the missionary 
of the cross to heathen lands, preparing the way 



In the Footsteps of Jesus 175 

by which His servant is to follow Him, and open- 
ing the path for the entrance of the truth into 
darkened minds and dying souls. He goes before 
the sister of Christian charity, on her divine errand 
of love and pity, to the abode of ignorance and 
poverty, or the bedside of disease and death. He 
goes before every trusting, obedient disciple to the 
spot where a difficult or perilous service is waiting 
to be done, or to the hour which is to call for some 
still more difficult, still more heroic endurance. 
We cannot see Him, but we shall find Him there, 
and His presence will make the achievement pos- 
sible, the trial light. Ah ! if we could but realize 
this, how strong and courageous and confident it 
would make us ! There is no loneliness — the most 
solitary way is bright and peaceful — to one who 
knows that the Lord is always with him. There is 
no such thing as failure for one who can (as it were) 
feel the nearness of that divine form which the eye 
cannot discern. Then difficulties seem to be swept 
from before us, as the summer wind sweeps away 
the mists that have settled upon land and sea. 
Then fear and doubt are dispelled, as when after 
many days of storm the sun breaks forth again, 
and all the sky is clear. So it was that the dis- 
ciples, believing that the living Lord was going be- 
fore them, went forth, in the might of an invincible 
faith, not to Galilee merely, but to the ends of the 
earth. The power by which they accomplished 
their great work was not in themselves. It was in 



1^6 Life Indeed 

Him, whom they obediently and gladly followed, 
and who not only manifested Himself repeatedly 
to them, but gave them strength and fortitude and 
courage for the stupendous task which He called 
them to undertake. 

And here is also our hope and our strength, in 
presence of the duties and trials by which we are 
so constantly confronted. It is comforting to 
remember that the path of life which we are tread- 
ing has once been trodden by the Son of God. It 
gives dignity and beauty to the lowliest career, and 
takes their terror and threat from the greatest 
emergencies. It makes temptation easier to face, 
and sorrow lighter to endure. The power to meet 
even death without shrinking, comes to us from the 
knowledge that He has passed through it into a 
larger and more glorious life ; and it is the glory of 
heaven itself that He — the Lord — awaits us there. 
But sweeter still to those who are weary and worn 
with the toil and conflict of life — sweeter and more 
inspiriting still, is the divine assurance of Him 
whom the grave could not detain, '^Lo, I am with 
you always,** or, more exactly, ''all the days,** — 
with you everyday, — ''till the world shall end.** 
He will go before you in a few moments, to your 
homes, and there He will be with you. He will 
go before you to-morrow to your business, and 
there, too. He will be with you. He will see you, 
though you may not see Him. He will hear you, 
as you speak to Him, though you speak to Him in 



In the Footsteps of Jesus 177 

the softest whisper, or only in your thought. He 
will not leave you, even if you forget Him, and 
wherever He may send you. He Himself will go 
before. 

All unseen the Master walketh 

By the toiling servant's side ; 
Comfortable words He speaketh, 

While His hands uphold and guide. 

Grief nor pain nor any sorrow 

Rends thy heart, to Him unknown ; 

He to-day, and He to-morrow, 
Grace sufficient gives His own. 

Holy strivings nerve and strengthen ; 

Long endurance wins the crown ; 
When the evening shadows lengthen. 

Thou shalt lay thy burden down. 

O the comfort and the glory of walking thus 
after the unseen Lord ! O the glory, greater still, of 
walking with Him by and by, in the light and peace 
and joy of Paradise ! 



JESUS ASLEEP 



And He was in the hijider part of the ship, 
asleep on a pillow. And they aivake Him, and 
say unto Hi^n, Master, car est Thou not that we 
perish ? — Mark iv. 38. 



X 

JESUS ASLEEP 

It had been a busy day in the life of our Lord. 
For many hours He had been teaching on the 
shore of the lake, and the multitude which gathered 
to hear Him was so great that He had at last 
stepped into a little boat, and making that His 
pulpit, had spoken from it to the crowds which 
lined the beach. Parable after parable of extra- 
ordinary beauty and power had fallen from His 
lips. No doubt, in the course of the day He had 
wrought many miracles of healing. At last, toward 
evening. He said to His disciples, ^*Let us cross 
over to the other side." Accordingly they dis- 
missed the multitude, took Him as He was in their 
small fishing-boat, and accompanied by many other 
boats of the same kind, set sail to cross the lake. 
It was only some six miles wide, and in an hour or 
so they should easily have reached its eastern 
shore. But a sudden squall came up, with the 
rapidity and violence with which such changes in 
the weather often occur on lakes that are embosomed 
in the hills. The skies grew dark, the waters be- 
came boisterous, the boat became unmanageable; 
it was rapidly filling, and seemed to be on the 
point of going down. And Jesus was asleep. 
181 



182 Life Indeed 

It was the sleep of weariness. He was a man, 
and like many another man was tired out with His 
long day's work. The physical limitations and 
infirmities with which we are all acquainted, were 
no less familiar to Him. He was exhausted by the 
mental tension and strain, involved in continuous 
teaching during so many hours. Not without a 
conscious drain upon His physical strength, as 
other circumstances indicate, did He perform His 
miraculous cures. And hea^vier still was the 
burden of sympathy resting upon His heart, as He 
observed the sad spiritual state of the men and 
women around Him, whom He compared to sheep 
without a shepherd, to lost children who had 
wandered far from their Father's house. It evi- 
dently cost Him something, more, doubtless, than 
we always realize, to do His daily work; and 
greater far than the physical fatigue or the mental 
effort involved in it, must have been the stress of 
feeling under which He lived, through all His 
public ministry. He must indeed have been 
thoroughly worn out, to have been able to sleep in 
such a storm. 

It was also the sleep of innocence. In such an 
hour of obvious peril, one who is troubled by a 
guilty conscience cannot sleep. Have you never 
gone to your rest, when the day's work was done 
and everything was quiet around you, and then 
been kept wide awake, hour after hour, by thoughts 
of the mistakes you had made, or the sins you had 



Jesus Asleep 183 

committed during the day ? Have you not some- 
times even been roused out of a restful slumber by 
the memory of some act of folly or of wickedness, 
which you perpetrated many days or weeks or 
years ago, and found yourself unable to expel it 
from your thoughts and go quietly to sleep again ? 
Have you never lain awake through some wild 
night at sea, when the great, strong ship was roll- 
ing heavily in the tumultuous waves, and wondered 
what would become of you, if anything should give 
way and the brave vessel should go down ? Jesus 
never made a mistake. He never committed a 
sin. He never neglected or turned aside from a 
duty. There was nothing to cause Him self-re- 
proach. His conscience was always perfectly clear. 
And therefore He could sleep even amidst the fury 
of the storm. 

And then again, it was the sleep of confidence. 
Who of us has not seen a little child falling asleep 
in the arms of its mother, with a look of perfect 
content and perfect trust on its pure face, lifting its 
little hands in a silent caress as the eyelids closed, 
and then resting, no matter what turmoil or peril 
might surround it, without a motion or a sound, 
absolutely secure, absolutely peaceful ? So Jesus 
slept, on that stormy night, in the open boat, amid 
the howling waters, under the pelting rain, no 
doubt, and through the wild raging of the wind, 
trustfully confiding in His Father's care. 

Now look at the disciples. They were not 



184 Life Indeed 

asleep. They had no business to be asleep. They 
were toiling with all their might. They were 
stoutly battling against wind and sea, striving to 
keep their little boat from being driven from its 
course or capsized or carried down. But they 
were terribly frightened ; and the whole story 
shows that they had good reason to be frightened. 
They were not timid men. They were not unused 
to such an experience. They were stout and 
hardy fishermen. They had lived for years on 
these treacherous waters. They had been caught 
before in many a storm. But never, it would 
seem, had they felt themselves to be in greater 
peril. They had done all that strong men could 
do, but they evidently thought that their last hour 
had come. They were looking death directly in 
the face. And then it occurred to them to do 
what we cannot help wondering that they had not 
done before, — it occurred to them to wake the 
Master. But they awoke Him with a strange ques- 
tion. They did not call upon Him to prepare to 
die, or if possible to try to save Himself. They 
asked Him, reproachfully, almost angrily, as it 
would seem, ^^ Carest Thou not that we perish? ** 

The answer of Jesus was still more surprising. 
** Where is your faith?*' He said, or, as another 
account of the incident reads, ^' How is it that ye 
have no faith?** That, then, was the trouble. 
They had skill enough, they had strength enough, 
they had courage enough, but they ought to have 



Jesus Asleep 185 

had more confidence, not in Him only, but in 
God. Even at that moment of excitement and 
danger, they ought to have remembered that they 
were in no real danger. They should have re- 
membered that it could not be God's will that He 
and they should perish on that stormy night, in 
the dark waters of the Lake of Galilee. It was 
not for this that He had come into the world, leav- 
ing His heavenly glory and entering into human 
life. It was not for this that He had undertaken 
the work which His Father had given Him to do. 
It was not for this that He had called them to be- 
come His disciples, and had begun to train them 
also for their work. So long as that work was un- 
finished, they were safe. They ought to have 
known that God would preserve them amidst all 
such dangers as those which now threatened them, 
until it was accomplished. If their address to 
Him was reproachful. His reply to it was much 
more so, and with far better reason. Their abject 
terror was due to their lack of faith, not in them- 
selves, but in Him, and in God who had sent Him. 
It was due to the fact that they had not yet 
grasped, as they ought to have done, and as they 
did afterward, the nature of His mission, that they 
did not appreciate the importance of His work, 
that they did not remember that no accident can 
ever arrest the plans of God, or imperil the lives of 
those to whose care they are entrusted. It was 
early in their intercourse with Jesus that this inci- 



186 Life Indeed 

dent occurred, and it is not perhaps surprising that 
they had not yet learned to trust Him with that 
entire confidence which they afterward acquired, 
or to trust in God with that entire self-surrender 
and composure of which He gave them so sublime 
an example. But it was of the utmost importance 
that they should learn this lesson, and that was, no 
doubt, the simple reason why this fierce storm was 
let loose upon them, and they were made to feel 
that there was nothing else for them to do but trust 
in God. Then the stars shone out once more, and 
all was safe and quiet. When the thrilling expe- 
rience had done its work, the winds might be 
locked up again in the caverns of the hills by the 
word of His power, and a great calm be spread 
over land and sea. 

And yet you will observe that the anxious and 
toil-worn disciples were not wholly without faith. 
They had faith enough to go to Christ and ask His 
help. And it is a striking evidence of the extent 
to which they had already learned to confide in 
His supernatural power. So far as the narrative 
shows, they had yet seen no miracle like that which 
they were soon to witness. They had seen Him 
change the water into wine, they had seen Him 
heal with a word or a touch many forms of disease ; 
but they had as yet had no proof of His power 
over the mighty energies of nature, so that even 
the winds and the waves were obedient to Him. 
And yet when they found themselves in this des- 



Jesus Asleep 187 

perate peril, they not only woke Him with their 
cry of distress, but their language, as it is re- 
corded for us, shows their faith that He had the 
power to save them if He would. How He would 
manifest that power, of course they did not know, 
but they had already seen so much of Him that 
they had come apparently to feel that He could do 
anything that He might choose to do. And so 
they went to Him and awoke Him and appealed to 
Him for help. Faith enough for that they had ! 
And it was not disappointed. He rose from the 
pillow on which He had been sleeping, and with a 
majesty which we can perhaps imagine but cannot 
describe. He rebuked the winds ; the waves sub- 
sided, and in a few moments the little boat had 
reached the land. 

Now the lessons which we may learn from this 
most picturesque and striking incident are obvious 
enough, but it is good for us to set them frequently 
and distinctly before our minds. What then took 
place on the sea of Tiberias, has often been re- 
peated in the history of Christ's people. Life is 
not all plain sailing, over smooth waters, under 
cloudless skies. Far from it. There are none of 
us over whom storms do not sometimes gather, 
none of us who do not sometimes find ourselves 
rudely tossed on troubled waves. We are battling, 
perhaps, against what we call adverse circumstances. 
The outward conditions of our life are such as to 
hinder us from doing what we would, as to con- 



188 Life Indeed 

demn us to exhausting and apparently vain exer- 
tions, as to imperil our success and perhaps our 
safety. We have to struggle against poverty, for 
example, against the disadvantages of early life, 
against repeated disappointment, against ill health, 
against bereavement and sorrow, against the op- 
position or the indifference or the treachery of our 
fellow-men. Year by year, it may be, we have kept 
up the strenuous but ill-rewarded struggle, and 
whichever way we have turned we have found our- 
selves baffled and beaten back, until heart and hope 
have almost gone out of us. The mighty and un- 
governed forces of life seem to have us at their 
mercy ; and it looks as if the waves would close 
over us before very long, and we should simply 
disappear and be forgotten. On the broad and 
stormy sea of life how many little boats, freighted 
with eager hopes and high ambitions and vast pos- 
sibilities of activity and happiness, are driving or 
drifting helplessly along, out of their true course, 
under no firm control, at the mercy of the waves, 
and ready to perish ! 

Or again, the turmoil and the peril are not with- 
out but within. They do not arise from the cir- 
cumstances in which we are placed, or the condi- 
tions in which we are living ; but we are buffeted by 
doubts and fears ; we are driven on by uncontrolla- 
ble passions; our own consciences have made cow- 
ards of us and robbed us of our moral strength. 
Truths which once shone like clear stars upon our 



Jesus Asleep 189 

minds, are now hidden by clouds of uncertainty or 
unbelief. We have lost our reckoning. We have been 
driven out of our course. Chart and compass have 
been lost, or have become useless. We are stagger- 
ing on blindly and helplessly, and nothing short of a 
miracle can save us from making shipwreck of our 
faith, perhaps even of our characters and lives. 
You know what I mean. You have yourselves, 
very likely, passed through such experiences. 
Some of you may perhaps be in this sad case to- 
day, or, if you are not, many other people are. It 
is not an unusual thing, even in these days of light 
and peace and prosperity and progress, for a human 
soul, even for a Christian soul, to be in as desperate 
a plight as the disciples in that little Galilean fish- 
ing-boat in which Jesus lay asleep. 

And so too it often has been with the Church. 
The Christian Church, which has since grown to 
such vast proportions, which has accomplished such 
a marvelous work, with which the hopes of humanity 
for the future are so closely identified — it was all in 
that boat, on that critical night, with Jesus and His 
friends. We sometimes say, and say truly, that 
the destinies of half the human race were in the 
little caravel which brought Columbus to the shores 
of the new world. We say that the germs of the 
great republic, which seems, whether we will or 
not, likely to expand into a great empire, not 
merely controlling this continent, but making its in- 
fluence felt all over the world, were in the little 



190 Life Indeed 

cabin of the Mayflower, as it lay, after its rough 
wintry voyage, in the ice-bound harbor of Plymouth. 
If so, what vastly greater interests were at stake 
when the little bark that carried the Christ and 
His chosen disciples was caught in the sudden 
storm, half-way across the lake of Galilee ! And 
if the Church of God, freighted with such incal- 
culable blessings for the human race, escaped that 
peril, it was only to meet many another not less 
critical, from which only the power of God Him- 
self has seemed able to save it. It has been 
threatened by the ever-repeated assaults of unbe- 
lief in a thousand different forms. It has seemed 
more than once on the point of being crushed by a 
hostile secular power. It has been the prey of in- 
ternal corruption ; it has been disturbed and rent 
asunder by the dissensions of its own members, 
who instead of joining hands in the endeavor to 
advance its influence in the world, have turned 
upon each other in the spirit of jealousy and hatred. 
And more than all, it has in every age, and never 
more than at the present moment, been in danger 
of becoming engulfed in the swelling floods of 
worldliness, by which it is surrounded. And it is 
no new thing for those who love the Church of 
Christ, who believe that the truth is committed to 
its keeping, that the most precious interests, not of 
individual souls only but of human civilization, 
depend upon its purity and permanence and prog- 
ress, that God has designed it and intends to use 



Jesus Asleep 191 

it for the final and complete redemption of man- 
kind — I say it is not an unusual thing for us to be 
from time to time discouraged and dismayed in 
view of the perils by which the Church is threat- 
ened. It does not seem possible for it to stand up 
against its external and its internal enemies. It 
seems as if it must be, if not shattered by the as- 
saults of unbelief, at least weakened and disin- 
tegrated by the insidious power of error and of 
worldliness, until at last it goes to pieces like some 
stout ship which the sea has finally conquered and 
carried down into its dark and silent depths. 

Now if ever we find ourselves in such a case, or 
if we are troubled by anxieties like these in regard 
to the future of the Church, it is well for us to re- 
member two or three things which the incident be- 
fore us distinctly and forcibly suggests. One of 
them is that every life is safe which has Jesus in it. 
And it is your privilege and mine so to associate 
ourselves with Him that His life and ours are 
really one life, and that each of us may say, as St. 
Paul said, '^I live, yet not I, but Christ is living in 
me.'* We cannot invite Him as a visible presence 
into our homes, we cannot take Him as a compan- 
ion with us on our journeys, but we may make a 
home for Him in our hearts, so that wherever we 
may be. He shall truly and always be with us. 

No one can read, I think, this story, without 
understanding what He meant when He said to 
His disciples, *' It is expedient for you that I should 



192 Life Indeed 

go away; ** — without realizing the gain to them, and 
to us also, which comes from the fact that He is 
with His people now as a spiritual presence in their 
thoughts and hearts and lives. Such a dreadful 
possibility as that which then presented itself to 
their minds — that they and He might perish to- 
gether — is no longer even conceivable. Our com- 
panionship with Him is not affected by the acci- 
dents of life. It is no more a question, whether 
or not He will go before us or with us, or whether 
we shall go with Him or without Him, along our 
earthly journey. He has come to be, if I may so 
express it, a part of us, and we can no more be 
separated from Him than we can be separated from 
ourselves. He it is whose thought is moulding 
and inspiring ours, whose spirit is animating and 
governing ours, who, as a divine energy within us, 
is directing our conduct, and forming our charac- 
ters, and controlling our lives. And out of the 
great and blessed fact that because we have given 
ourselves to Him He has taken such possession of 
us, comes our assurance of safety amidst all the 
emergencies and perils of life. No real evil can 
befall us if we abide in this relation to Him. For 
He has the power, as He has certainly the will, to 
turn all apparent evil into good. We may have to 
toil and suffer, we may be almost overwhelmed by 
disappointment, our plans may be shattered, our 
hopes may be quenched, we may feel that we are 
accomplishing nothing, it may seem as if the battle 



Jesus Asleep 193 

of life were going against us, and as if neither our 
own best aspirations nor the promises of God were 
to be fulfilled. But it is not so. If Christ is in 
our hearts and in our lives, ruling them, moulding 
them, and working in and through them His own 
will, then we are perfectly safe. Let the storm rage, 
let the sea toss us in its mighty arms, let the cloud- 
wrack blot the sun and stars out of the sky, we 
will not complain, we will not fear ! We are 
Christ's and He is ours. He is with us, and noth- 
ing can harm us. What are winds and waves to 
Him who made them, who holds them as in the 
hollow of His hand, who rouses them as He listeth, 
and who says to them, '^ Peace, be still ! '* 

Here too is the safety of the Church. Not in its 
numbers or its wealth or its social prestige ] not in 
the antiquity or the accuracy of its symbols ; not in 
the friendship or the honor of the world ; it is in 
the fact that the Spirit of Jesus Christ is in it. It 
is bearing Him, so to speak, across the floods of 
time. Not as a lovely memory, not as a rare ideal, 
not as a form once living but now dead, embalmed 
in the fragrance of a loving but vain devotion ; not 
thus, but as a vital, vivifying, energizing power, is 
Christ present in His Church. He has been in it 
from the beginning. He is in it still. And that 
is what has saved it in all the stormy scenes through 
which it has passed. That is what will save it in 
all the time to come. Where is your faith, O you 
who think that the Church is decaying, that the 



194 Life Indeed 

gospel is losing its power, that the time is coming 
when Christianity will be thrown up with other 
wrecked religions on the shore, while men go sail- 
ing proudly forth into new and vaster seas of 
thought ? Where is your faith in Him who said, 
**Lo! I am with you always, therefore go and 
teach the nations '' ? Not until that promise fails, 
not until the power which subdued the angry sea is 
itself conquered by some greater power, can the 
gospel lose its vitality, or the Church be arrested in 
its mighty career. 

And Jesus is not now asleep. It sometimes 
seems as if He were. No doubt it has often seemed 
so to us, when the waves and billows of some ter- 
rible experience were rolling over us, when our 
prayers seemed to be unheard, when the help we 
needed did not come, when all was dark within as 
well as round about us, and our faith in God and 
man was on the point of giving way. It has 
seemed to us, possibly, as if Jesus must be asleep, 
when His Church has been rent by warring fac- 
tions, or dishonored by the scandalous conduct of 
its members, or transformed into a haughty and 
ambitious hierarchy, or invaded and benumbed by 
the spirit of the world. We have remembered the 
bitter taunt flung by Elijah at the priests of Baal, 
and have felt as if the enemies of our divine Lord 
might almost address it to us : '^ Cry aloud ! for 
he is a god. Either he is talking, or he is pur- 
suing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he 



Jesus Asleep 195 

sleepeth and must be awakened ! '' It is hard to 
believe that He is calmly looking on while some 
things that we observe from day to day are taking 
place on earth; that He knows what His people 
are suffering ; that He knows to what His Church 
is exposed. And there are those who honestly 
think that He is asleep. There are those who do 
not hesitate to say that He has never wakened out 
of that deep slumber into which He fell, when the 
noonday darkness gathered over Him and He 
ceased to speak and move. In musical but mourn- 
ful verse they sing : 

Now He is dead ! Far hence He lies 

In the lorn Syrian town ; 
And on His grave, with shining eyes, 

The Syrian stars look down. 

No, He is neither dead nor sleeping ! In spite 
of everything which may cast a momentary doubt 
upon His power to do anything now for the Church 
or for the world, Christendom still bears witness to 
the fact that He is living ; the Church itself bears 
witness to the fact of His continuing union with it. 
The inmost consciousness of millions of believing 
and adoring hearts bears witness to His indwelling 
presence. He is living, not in heaven only, but 
here in the midst of us on earth. And He is ever 
ready to work, He is ever actually working, for the 
defence, the deliverance, and the consolation of 
those who trust and serve Him, and for the ad- 



196 Life Indeed 

vancement of His kingdom toward its final tri- 
umph. 

It is never possible, in any given emergency, 
either in our personal experience or in the life of 
the Church, to know when or how He will manifest 
His power. But we may always be sure of this, 
that the more critical the emergency, the more im- 
minent the peril, so much the more certain is He 
to make it an occasion for some signal revelation 
of His glory. So it has been a thousand times 
since He rose from His sleep at the cry of His dis- 
ciples and hushed the tempest with a word. What 
they expected Him to do when they awoke Him, 
we cannot imagine. They could not probably 
themselves have said. Doubtless the very last 
thing which they looked for, was the thing that 
happened. Never since the world began had the 
waters and the winds listened to a human voice 
and ceased their raging because it commanded 
them to be still. But so it was that He who 
showed His need of sleep after a day of toil, 
showed also His possession of a power to which 
nothing, absolutely, was impossible. And we have 
a perfect right to believe that when we are in the 
very direst straits and the very deadliest peril, we 
have then most reason to expect the pity and the 
help of Christ. We ought long ago to have learned 
that what is not only improbable but impossible for 
us, is perfectly easy for Him. There is no danger 
from which He cannot rescue us, there is no sor- 



Jesus Asleep 197 

row in which He cannot comfort us, there is no 
burden which He cannot enable us to bear, there 
is no duty which we cannot do with His aid. It 
does not make the sHghtest difference how great 
our need is. He can supply it ; it does not make 
the slightest difference how great our prayer is. He 
can answer it. *'A11 power,*' He said, '^ in heaven 
and on earth, is given unto Me,** and therefore we 
may trust Him absolutely and always. 

And so it follows that no Christian should ever 
be afraid of anything. I do not mean, of course, 
that there are any of us to whom trial and suffering 
will not come. I do not mean that we shall not 
meet with many a loss, with many a disaster, or 
that we shall not by and by be called to part with 
life itself. Christ does not always rebuke the 
storm. He sometimes lets it rage in all its fury. 
But He enables us to ride it out in safety. Or if, 
as sometimes happens, He lets us go down under 
it. He transforms even that mysterious experience 
into a blessing. He leads us, not merely under the 
cloud, but through it, not merely over the sea, but 
through it, very often ; but He brings us, or will 
bring us by and by, in safety to the heavenly land. 
Dropping all figures of speech : nothing can harm 
any one who is a true follower of Christ. No evil, 
however great, however real, can befall him, which 
will not prove a source of good. That is His 
promise, and those who have believed it, have al- 
ways found it fulfilled. Not here on earth, neces- 



198 Life Indeed 

sarily, but somewhere in the vast reahns of life ap- 
pointed for us, His disciphne of our characters will 
bear its golden fruit. Defeat will be turned into 
triumph, sorrow into joy, disappointment and dis- 
aster into an eternal weight of glory. 

So, then, if any of us are in trouble, we may 
well do as the disciples did — go to Jesus for help. 
Stand up bravely to your work, as they did, how- 
ever laborious and perilous it may be, as long as 
you can. Do not give up the ship, though it may 
seem as if you must soon be washed out of it, or 
as if you and it must ere long go down together. 
Work and pray at the same time, but never give 
up your faith in God, in Christ, in the divine wis- 
dom, power, and love. It is not very much to be 
wondered at that our faith sometimes fails us in 
the crises of life, yet these are the times when we 
need it most, and these are the times that it is 
meant for. I am almost tempted to say that we can 
get along without it when everything goes well with 
us ; but when everything is going against us, and 
when nothing else is left to us, then it is that faith, 
blind, unreasoning, if you will have it so, but un- 
wavering and unconquerable, is an unspeakable 
solace and support. 

And lastly, if you have faith enough at such a 
time to lead you to go to Christ, you have faith 
enough ; not all that you desire, perhaps, nor all 
that you have prayed for, nor all that you have ex- 
pected God to give you. But you have enough to 



Jesus Asleep 199 

save you from your troubles, from your fears, from 
your perils, from your sins even, because it is not 
your faith, it is always Christ that saves ; and if 
you will only go to Him and ask His pity, pardon, 
and help, you will have a clearer, stronger and 
more jubilant faith in Him as time goes on. For 
He will surely strengthen as well as reward it. All 
that we need is simply to trust Him, and then to 
let Him do with us and for us what He will. 
*<Carest Thou not that we perish?'* cried the 
alarmed disciples. O who in all the universe cares 
so much that we should not perish, as He who so 
loved us that He died for us, who watches over us 
unceasingly, who is always seeking to bind us more 
closely to Himself, and who, when the voyage of 
this life is over, will surely land us on the celestial 
shore ? 



THE LEADERSHIP OF LITTLE CHILDREN 



And a little child shall lead them, — Is a. xi. 6. 



XI 

THE LEADERSHIP OF LITTLE CHILDREN 

Almost every people has had its dream of a 
golden age. In most of the ancient mythologies 
there is found a tradition of a better time, when the 
earth was the common property of man, and pro- 
duced of itself whatever he needed. The land 
then flowed with milk and honey. Beasts of prey 
lived peaceably with other animals, and men were 
free from selfishness and pride and the other pas- 
sions and vices which now mar their happiness. 
The Greeks and Romans placed this golden age 
under the rule of Saturn, and cherished the hope 
that it would some day return. There is a famous 
passage in one of the eclogues of Virgil, which may 
possibly have been suggested by that prophecy of 
Isaiah from which the text is taken, *^Now," he 
says, ^^the reign of Saturn begins again. Every- 
where the earth pours forth her fruits without cul- 
ture. The fields grow yellow with soft ears of corn. 
Blushing grapes hang on rude brambles, and hard 
oaks distill honey. The ground shall not endure 
the harrow, nor the vineyard the pruning-hook. 
The serpent also shall die, poisonous plants disap- 
pear, and the Assyrian spikenard shall grow in 
every soil.*' 

203 



204 Life Indeed 

A similar picture of the golden age that is to 
come is given in Pope's stately ode on the Messiah : 

On rifted rocks, the dragon's late abode, 

The green reed trembles and the bulrush nods ; 

Waste sandy valleys, once perplexed with thorn, 

The spiry fir and shapely box adorn ; 

To leafless shrubs the flowery palms succeed, 

And odorous myrtle to the noisome weed ; 

The lambs with wolves shall graze the verdant mead^ 

And boys in flowery bands the tiger lead ; 

The steer and lion at one crib shall meet, 

And harmless serpents lick the pilgrim's feet ; 

The smiling infant in his hand shall take 

The crested basilisk and speckled snake, — 

Pleased the green lustre of the scales survey, 

And with their forked tongues shall innocently play. 

But neither the Latin nor the English poet has 
equaled the simplicity and beauty of the ancient 
Hebrew prophecy by which the latter at least was 
certainly inspired : ** The wolf also shall dwell 
with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with 
the kid ; and the calf and the young lion and the 
fatling together ; and a little child shall lead them. 
And the cow and the bear shall feed, their young 
ones shall lie down together ; and the lion shall eat 
straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play 
on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall 
put his hand on the basilisk's den. They shall not 
hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain ; for the 
earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as 
the waters cover the sea.'* 



Leadership of Little Children 205 

In this splendid language the blessedness of the 
reign of Messiah is foretold. It is to be an age of 
universal peace, when even wild beasts will lose 
their ferocity, and men hardly less savage will dwell 
together in harmony and love. The vision has not 
yet been fulfilled. But the forces which tend to 
accomplish it entered into human life with the com- 
ing of the Lord Jesus to the earth, and day by day 
and year by year the world is steadily moving to- 
ward it. The whole creation, according to the 
great thought of the apostle Paul, shares in the re- 
demption which He came to work out, and the time 
is certainly approaching when the prophecy of the 
angels' song will be fulfilled, and there shall be 
peace on earth as there is glory and praise in 
heaven. 

One part of the prophet's glowing picture is . 
worthy to be separated from the rest and considered 
by itself. "A little child shall lead them.'* It 
suggests as a topic which is peculiarly appropriate 
to the Christmas season, the Leadership of Little 
Children. 

We do not commonly associate the idea of lead- 
ership with childhood. It seems rather to require 
mental and moral as well as physical qualities which 
belong only to maturer years. To be a leader of 
men one must have what a child does not possess, 
a clear and trained intelligence, a strong and well 
regulated will, a firm but gentle hand. Leadership 
implies a certain large experience of life, or at all 



206 Life Indeed 

events a natural energy and a power of self-control, 
which are rare even in men, and are not to be 
looked for in children. And yet there are many 
senses in which children are really the leaders of 
those who far surpass them in knowledge and in 
power. The fact is a sign that the kingdom of 
heaven has already come in some measure ; it is a 
prophecy that it is yet to come completely and 
everywhere. 

A little child is not a safe leader in matters 
which require wise judgment and a varied ex- 
perience. Obvious however as this is, it is very 
often lost sight of, in this country especially, and at 
the present day. It is sometimes said with some 
truth that we are reversing the ancient command, 
and are reading it thus : Parents, obey your chil- 
dren. Some of us at least imagine that we discern 
both in our own children and in those of other people 
a spirit of self-confidence, self-will and independence 
of authority, which is not altogether prophetic of 
good. It may be, perhaps, in the eager American 
blood. It may be strengthened and stimulated by the 
keen American air. It is, at all events, fostered by 
certain usages and influences that are prominent in 
American life. Not a few parents in our day are 
not merely led but ruled by their children. And 
children sometimes have a way of putting forward 
their opinions, of delivering their judgments, of 
insisting that their tastes shall be gratified and their 
will be obeyed, which is, to say the least, a wide 



Leadership of Little Children 207 

departure from the practice of former times. There 
is no doubt a tendency in elderly people to resent 
and resist what appears to them to be the intrusion 
of the younger generation upon the stage of life, 
where they themselves have hitherto played the 
leading parts. But not old people alone, all 
thoughtful observers remark in our American life a 
certain uppishness and forwardness, a rude self- 
assertion, on the part of the young, which is hardly 
in keeping with the fitness of things, and which 
does not tend to elevate the tone of society. The 
ancient form of the command was much better. It 
is more in accord with the constitution of society, 
as that was ordained by its divine Author, and 
both parents and children are likely to be happier 
if it is left as it was written by the finger of God on 
the tables of stone and on human nature as well. 
There is great beauty, certainly, in the eager 
enthusiasm of childhood and youth, in its dash and 
its fire, its self-confidence and its energy. And 
yet, after all, experience too is worth something in 
the practical conduct of life. There are certain 
lessons to be learned from the past which childhood 
has not yet had time to gather up, and the mature 
and practiced judgment is a safer guide than an 
active but undisciplined brain and a fervid but 
ungoverned temper. It is better to place a p)n'amid 
on its base than on its apex. A ship is more 
likely to come safely into port if it is under the con- 
trol of experienced sailors than of novices who are 



208 Life Indeed 

going to sea for the first time. Raw recruits have 
their place and their value in an army, but the 
battle is more likely to be won if they have trained 
and tried officers over them. Life is not altogether 
an experiment. Men have been living a long time. 
Some things have been found out. Some principles 
are settled. And life is most likely to be successful 
when these principles govern it, and when it is 
shaped in accordance with the wisdom of the past. 
If there is to be law, authority, obedience, it seems 
natural that the sources of it should be at the top 
and not at the bottom. If the judgment of the 
aged comes into collision with that of the young, it 
would seem to be proper that the young should give 
way. The simple fact is that children need guid- 
ance, and are not competent to be the guides of 
those who are older and wiser than they. It is no 
infringement of their rights, no restriction of their 
independence, that they should follow while others 
lead. The duty of patient forbearance on the part 
of the parent ought not to need insisting upon. 
Not only the rights but the weaknesses of childhood 
are to be taken into account. ^* I do not beat my 
child,*' said a wise man once, *^the world will beat 
him fast enough.** Children are more easily led 
than driven. And yet the child that has never 
learned to submit to authority and yield to control, 
is likely never to learn to govern and control him- 
self. The world will not be better managed than 
it is at present, if the authority which hitherto has 



Leadership of Little Children 209 

belonged to the parent is usurped by the child. 
The precept of the apostle Paul, *^ Children, obey 
your parents," is still sound, though somewhat old- 
fashioned. 

But that leadership of children of which I would 
especially speak is not a deliberate but an uncon- 
scious leadership. They lead us, for one thing, 
into a deeper knowledge of love. We do not, 
indeed, get from them our first lessons in love, for 
we bring great capacities of loving with us into the 
world, and these find their objects very early in life. 
The first thing almost which we learn is to love. 
Our power to love grows stronger as the years 
advance. We love our friends, we love our homes, 
we love our country, we love the natural world 
around us, we love God and truth and virtue, 
without perhaps any distinct help from our children. 
And there is a love which binds human hearts 
together, though they may have long lived as 
strangers to each other, in a relation which is the 
most intimate and sacred in life. And yet every 
little child brings to its parents a new revelation of 
the nature and depth and power of love. There is 
certainly a difference between parental love and 
any other. There are in it elements of unselfish- 
ness, of patience, of watchful care, of hope and 
fear, of pride and grief, for which we look else- 
where in vain. No other form of human affection 
is so pure. No other is so utterly incomprehensible 
to one who has not felt it. The little child, whose 



210 Life Indeed 

presence awakens it, is utterly ignorant of its in- 
tensity, and often holds it in slight esteem. It is a 
love which asks for very little, but which cannot 
possibly give too much; a love which seeks the 
highest welfare of its object, and is as free from 
jealousy as it is from self-seeking. It is of all 
sentiments the most generous and elastic, giving 
itself forth to each one of many children as if that 
were the only child. And so it is the best earthly 
type of the unmeasured love of God. The Saviour 
Himself could find no better image than that of a 
father under which to reveal to us the great Being 
who had sent Him, and He even appealed, in His 
instruction, to our love for our children as a proof 
of God's love for us. ^*If ye then," He said, 
*' being evil know how to give good gifts to your 
children, how much more shall your Father in 
heaven give you everything you need.** It is 
certainly a most striking thought which the late 
Professor Drummond has so brilliantly urged, that 
the whole progress of the creation, from the first 
appearance of life on earth, has tended toward the 
development of love. He has pointed out to us in 
the slow evolutions of the past not merely a struggle 
for life, but a struggle for the life of others, which 
culminates at last in the affection of a mother for 
her child. '^ The idea of mothers,** he says, ^' has 
from the beginning been in Nature's mind, and she 
has always been trying to draw closer and closer 
the bonds which unite the children of men.** If it 



Leadership of Little Children 211 

is love which gives to the world the little child, the 
child amply repays the debt by the love which it 
awakens in the heart of the parent ; and as there is 
nothing in us which is nobler than this parental 
affection, our highest development is, in a sense, in 
the hands of our children. It is theirs to lead us 
to heights of experience from which we obtain the 
clearest visions, and on which we breathe the 
purest airs. 

Unconsciously also do little children lead us to 
realize the charm and beauty of certain traits of 
personal character. We do not, of course, look 
to them as examples of qualities which are the 
product of training and experience, which, if not 
originated, are developed and made prominent by 
collision with the world, and by the responsibility 
and suffering of which this is the cause. We fre- 
quently speak of the character of a child as un- 
formed, and so in one sense it is. It is not ham- 
mered into shape by the influences of society, nor 
hardened by habit into unalterable forms. It is 
still docile and pliant, waiting to be moulded, as it 
may be, by wise training on the one hand, or by 
the accidental influence of circumstances on the 
other. But just for this reason it shows us what 
human nature is in its essence and at its best. It 
has a freshness, a purity, which may afterward be 
lost, like that of the early morning air before it is 
clouded and stained by volumes of smoke from 
factory chimneys. As Dr. Guthrie says, *^The 



212 Life Indeed 

morning, with every flower glistening in dews, the 
fresh air loaded with perfumes, the hills bathed in 
golden light, the skies ringing with the song of 
larks, is beautiful ; and beautiful as the morning of 
day is that of life/* 

There is in childhood a sweet simplicity, for ex- 
ample, which has an infinite charm for one who 
turns to it from the artificiality and deceitfulness of 
later life. Concealment and cunning are the vices 
at once of the lowest and of the highest civiliza- 
tion. The savage exhibits them at one extreme, 
the highly trained man of afi'airs at the other. To 
hide what we do not want to have known, to put 
the best possible appearance upon what we do, to 
try to make other people think that we are a little 
richer, wiser or better than we are, how common 
all this is among us ! How rare is absolute hon- 
esty, truthfulness, sincerity, in word and deed ! 
But this, in its absolute perfection, is shown by the 
little child, whose nature is as transparent as the 
waters of a mountain lake, or as the cloudless sum- 
mer sky. Every thought and feeling is instantly 
expressed in word and look, with a frankness that 
is as free from suspicion as from fear. The child 
does not feel the need of concealment, until driven 
to it, perhaps, by unkindness or injustice, and all 
pretence is foreign to its nature. Herein is the 
secret of its singular power even over coarse and 
hardened minds ; and few things are sadder than 
to see the frank simplicity of childhood giving 



Leadership of Little Children 213 

place to the reserve and caution, perhaps the cun- 
ning and hypocrisy, which are so early learned 
from contact with the world. As long as it lasts, 
it not only attracts and fascinates others, but it 
tends to make them also genuine and true. But 
once lost, it can seldom be recovered, except as 
sometimes, at the other extreme of life, the truth 
and the Spirit of God may develop in old age a 
simplicity of character which is like that of child- 
hood. 

Then, for another thing, little children are the 
world's best teachers of faith. It is perfectly nat- 
ural to a child to believe. It undoubtingly accepts 
what is told it as the truth, and it relies with a con- 
fidence which sometimes makes one tremble, on 
the power, wisdom and love of older people. 
Doubt and distrust come later, casting their icy 
chill upon the heart. The child believes not only 
everything but everybody. It has, of course, to 
learn that not every statement is true, not every 
man or woman worthy of confidence, but the 
sweet and simple trustfulness of little children not 
only touches the heart of every one who observes 
it, but tends to make those toward whom it is shown 
worthy of the confidence which is thus reposed in 
them. Few things reveal a brutal and vicious na- 
ture more clearly than willingness to deceive a little 
child. No one in this world is wise or strong or 
good enough to be worthy of such implicit trust, 
but there is One above us on whom we can thus 



214 Life Indeed 

rely with an absolute faith. And this surely must 
have been one of the things which the Lord had in 
mind, when He said that except we become as 
little children we cannot enter the kingdom of 
heaven. 

Another element in the beauty of childhood is 
its still unsullied purity. It is hard to look into 
the face of a child and retain one's faith in original 
sin. Of course, there are in all children capaci- 
ties of evil and tendencies toward it, which will 
not be slow in revealing themselves, as there are 
forces of destruction slumbering in the softest sum- 
mer air. But, as a lover of little children has said, 
'^ Fallen though we are, there remains a purity, 
modesty, ingenuousness, and tenderness of con- 
science about childhood, that looks as if the glory 
of Eden yet lingered over it, like the light of even 
on the hilltops when the sun is down.'' Innocent, 
at all events, a little child still is, of the evil which 
is around it in the world. Alas, that it must ever 
come to know how great and how dark it is ! 
What a responsibility rests upon a parent for keep- 
ing, so far as human power can, the mind and soul 
of a child from contact with what is base and vile ! 
What a responsibility rests upon society at large, 
for the preservation, not merely of the physical, 
but of the moral health of children ! It is not 
only one of the most sacred things on earth, it is 
also a purifying influence in the sphere of life in 
which it is observed. It tends to keep those around 



Leadership of Little Children 215 

it pure. How many a man has been restrained by 
it from evil deeds that he was tempted to commit ! 
There is a sentence in Juvenal which expresses a 
thought which was rare in antiquity, but is com- 
mon enough now. **The greatest reverence/' he 
says, ''is due to a boy. If you are making ready 
for anything base, do not despise the years of the 
child, but let your infant son stand in the way of 
the sin about to be committed. '^ The purity of 
children not only hinders the commission of sin, it 
has a thousand times led to the reformation of 
those already hardened by it. Thankful indeed 
ought we to be for the moral influence which they 
unconsciously exert. ''God sends them to us,'* 
says Mary Howitt, "for another purpose than 
merely to keep up the race. He sends them to en- 
large our hearts, to make us unselfish and full of 
kindly affections and sympathies, to give our souls 
higher aims, to call out all our faculties, to extend 
enterprise and exertion, to bring around our fire- 
sides bright faces and happy smiles and loving, 
tender hearts. My soul praises the great Father 
every day that He has gladdened the earth with 
little children.*' 

These last words remind us, for another thing, 
that it is the little child who leads the household 
and who makes the home. There are, indeed, 
beautiful homes which are not brightened by the 
presence of children. Yet there is truth in the 
quaint sentence of Southey, who says that "a 



216 Life Indeed 

house is never perfectly furnished for enjoyment 
unless there is a child in it rising three years old, 
and a kitten rising three weeks." *^ Tell me not," 
says another writer, ^'of the trim, precisely ar- 
ranged homes, where there are no children, where, 
as the Germans say, Hhe fly-traps always hang 
straight on the wall.' Tell me not of the never- 
disturbed nights and days, of the tranquil, un- 
anxious hearts where children are not." These 
are not the homes in which the truest happiness is 
found. It is a simple matter of history that houses 
were first built for the shelter of children. Men 
and women can bear exposure and hardship which 
would be fatal to a child. But the tender child-life 
makes necessary the hut in which the savage lives, 
and out of which has grown, by natural evolution, 
every building that man has erected on the earth. 
Palaces, castles, stately and splendid cathedrals are 
but later developments of the thought which found 
its first expression in a roof of boughs and a wall 
of mud. The necessities of childhood have thus 
led to all the various architecture of the world. 
But it is true also that morally even more than 
physically, it is the little child who makes the 
home. In him the home-life centres. It is ad- 
justed to his physical and intellectual wants, to his 
protection and care, and to his preparation for the 
activities of future years. The little life which 
cannot provide for itself, which cannot prepare it- 
self for the career which is before it, not merely 



Leadership of Little Children 217 

awakens love, but compels and directs the activity 
of those to whose loving care it is entrusted. And 
all this directly affects and even determines the 
character of the parent as well as that of the 
child. It is not merely true, as Lord Bacon says, 
that **he that hath wife and children hath given 
hostages to fortune''; but the various needs and 
claims of our children determine in great measure 
what we shall do, and so decide what we shall be. 
It is the Httle child that leads the household. 

In some measure also it leads the state. We all 
know in what manner the ancient state regarded 
and treated the child ; how it placed in the hands 
of the parent absolute power of life and death ; 
how it ruthlessly exposed the sickly and deformed ; 
how it left the others to be educated among slaves, 
and to adopt the ideas and manners and vices of 
slaves ; how it regarded even their death as a mat- 
ter of unconcern. Contrast with all this the pro- 
visions made in modern communities for the wel- 
fare of the little child. Think of the care which 
the state gives to its mental training as well as its 
physical life; how it protects the child by strin- 
gent laws against cruelty and neglect on the part of 
the parent ; how it provides asylums for the desti- 
tute and the orphan, and hospitals for the care of 
children exclusively, from the very earliest mo- 
ments of life. Of course the power which has 
wrought this immense change in the temper and 
attitude of the state toward the child is chiefly the 



218 Life Indeed 

Christian religion ; and if that religion had ac- 
complished nothing else in the world, it would for 
this alone deserve our honor and gratitude. ^^In- 
stitutions of beneficence/* as Dr. Storrs has said, 
''for the shelter and nurture of children, such as 
had not been known in the world till the power of 
Christianity began to be felt, are now common in 
the countries which Christianity has blessed ; while 
the Church, inspired by the words and the action 
of Him whom it accepts as Master, regulates its 
worship, constructs its buildings, invents or ap- 
plies new forms of art, creates a new literature, to 
minister to children.'' The ancient prophecy is 
thus again fulfilled, and the little child leads the 
state as well as the household. And all this is 
done not merely from motives of self-preservation. 
The state is prompted by a more humane and a 
more spiritual purpose, in thus assuming and ex- 
tending the office of the parent. One of the high- 
est functions which modern governments exercise is 
that of opening to every child within their limits 
the avenues of knowledge and of that power which 
knowledge gives. 

These thoughts spring naturally and freshly to 
mind at each recurring Christmas season. For the 
influence of childhood on the thought and life of 
the world is largely due to the teachings of Jesus. 
He was, as has been justly said, '* the first great 
teacher of men who showed a genuine sympathy 
for childhood. He was perhaps the only teacher 



Leadership of Little Children 219 

of antiquity who cared for childhood, as such. 
Plato treats of children and their games, but he 
treats them as elements not to be left out in con- 
structing society. They are not to be neglected 
because they will inevitably come to be men and 
women. But Jesus was the first who loved child- 
hood for the sake of childhood. The ancients es- 
teemed it their first duty to put away childish 
things, but Jesus in seeking to bring about a new 
and higher development of character, perceived 
that there were elements of character in childhood 
which were to be preserved in the highest man- 
hood. He sav/ that a man must indeed set back 
again toward the simplicity and innocence of child- 
hood, if he would be truly a man. Until Jesus 
Christ, the world had little place for childhood in 
its thoughts. When He said, ^ Of such is the 
kingdom of heaven,' it was a revelation." 

And yet it is not merely in this general way that 
Isaiah's prophecy has been fulfilled. There has been 
on earth one little child toward whom the thoughts of 
the world turn as they do not to any other, and who 
has led it to the highest and most precious things 
which it has yet attained. It is a fact as glorious 
as it is full of mystery, that God, becoming in- 
carnate in the world, should have entered human 
life in the person of the Babe of Bethlehem, and 
the Boy of Nazareth. That little child around 
whose rude bed the shepherds gathered, while over 
it the angels sang their Christmas hymn, leads us 



220 Life Indeed 

at once to new thoughts of God. How wonderful 
was His condescension, in thus taking upon Him 
our nature, not in its greatness but in its weakness, 
not in the maturity of its powers but in the utter 
helplessness of infancy ! How thoroughly did He 
thus identify Himself with humanity, passing 
through all the stages of human growth and expe- 
rience, from infancy to manhood, from the manger 
to the cross ! What consecration is given to all 
our homes by the presence of the Son of God in 
the humble home of the Nazarene carpenter ! 
What a supreme benediction has come upon mother- 
hood from her to whom this priceless gift of God 
was sent ! How all infancy is set hereafter in a 
sacredness, which makes forever impossible the in- 
difference and cruelty which were shown toward it 
in the centuries which preceded the advent of 
Christ ! If the Lord had come from heaven to 
earth in a chariot of cloud or fire, and had first ap- 
peared as a man moving about among men, He 
would not have so glorified our human nature, as 
when He assumed it in the unconsciousness and 
helplessness of infancy, and carried it forward 
through childhood to youth, and through youth to 
manhood, coming thus into closest relation with 
every successive period of life. The old church- 
father Irenseus shows that the spirit of Christmas- 
day was not unknown even in the second century, 
when he says of the Lord that ^' He sanctified 
every age by that period corresponding to it which 



Leadership of Little Children 221 

belonged to Himself. For He came to save all by 
means of Himself, — all, I say, who through Him 
are born again to God, — infants and children, and 
boys, and young men and old men. He therefore 
passed through every age, becoming an infant for 
infants, thus sanctifying infancy ; a child for chil- 
dren, thus sanctifying this age ; being at the same 
time made to all an example of piety, righteous- 
ness and submission.'* 

And so, for another thing, the childhood of 
Jesus leads us to see what childhood should always 
be. We have indeed no record of the boyhood and 
youth that were passed in the rude and perhaps 
squalid village among the mountains of Galilee, 
where Jesus grew up. And yet we are hardly more 
sure of what His manhood was, than of what His 
childhood must have been. It must have been 
pure, it must have been gentle, it must have been 
loving and helpful. It cannot have been lacking 
in courage. It was certainly marked by filial obe- 
dience. There was in it the same firm resistance 
of evil which was manifest in later years. It did 
not disdain or shirk the humblest duties belonging 
to a life of toil. It won the love of brothers and 
sisters, of neighbors and friends; and with the 
growing sense of the great career appointed for 
Him by His Father in heaven, for thirty years this 
young man of Nazareth was willing to be known 
only as the carpenter's son. All beautiful traits of 
boyhood and youth were certainly collected and 



222 Life Indeed 

embodied in Him. And so the silent years of ob- 
scurity and of growth become not less suggestive 
to us than the years of public activity which fol- 
lowed them. He who has given to the world its 
only type of a perfect manhood, has reminded us 
as well of what childhood may be. 

Another thing which instantly follows from this, 
as a practical lesson of the childhood of Jesus, is 
that no little child is too young to be a Christian. 
It may perhaps seem to those of you who are 
children, as if you could not copy the example of 
the great Teacher and Prophet, who wrought so 
many miracles and said so many wonderful things. 
But think of Him as He was in the home of Joseph 
and Mary; a little child, a growing boy, a youth 
engaged in His earthly father's business, as well as 
in that of His Father in heaven ; diligent, truthful, 
loving and faithful; pure in thought and feeling 
and purpose ; and remember that He was once at 
precisely the same age at which you now are, and 
if you follow the child Jesus, you too will deserve 
to be called His disciple. Put yourself, as it were, 
even now in His company ; grow up with Him as 
the years add themselves to one another in your 
life, and it may be that you will never know when 
you became a Christian, because you will always 
have been His companion and friend. 

Another thing which is suggested to us by this 
train of reflection, and which each return of the 
Christmas time should impress on us anew, is the 



Leadership of Little Children 223 

duty of looking after and saving the children. 
The work that we do, or try to do, for the moral 
and spiritual reformation of men and women 
around us, is often discouraging and apparently 
fruitless ; but work done for the young never fails 
of its reward. And here is our hope, our one hope, 
of reforming society and bringing the world under 
the power of Christian truth. An impression for 
good or for evil made on the mind of a little child, 
is never effaced. ** In our great museums,** as a 
well-known English writer says, ** you see stone slabs 
with the marks of rain that fell hundreds of years 
before Adam lived, and the footprint of some wild 
bird that passed over the beach in those old, old 
times. The passing shower and the light foot left 
their prints on the soft sediment. Then ages went 
on and it has hardened into stone. And there 
they remain and will remain forevermore. That is 
like a man's spirit; in the childish days so soft, so 
susceptible to all impressions, so joyous to receive 
new ideas, treasuring them up, gathering them all 
into itself, retaining them all forever. And then as 
years go on, habit, the growth of the soul into 
steadiness and power, and many other reasons be- 
side, gradually make us less and less capable of 
being profoundly and permanently influenced by 
anything outside of us, so that the process from 
childhood to manhood is a process of getting less 
impressible.'* ^' There is little hope,** says an old 
writer, ^^of children who are educated wickedly. 



224 Life Indeed 

If the dye have been in the wool, it is hard to get 
it out of the cloth." This lesson is certainly too 
obvious to be mistaken. If we are to extend the 
kingdom of the Master in the world, we must seek 
first of all to bring the children under its light and 
power. 

And finaJly, there comes to us from the manger 
at Bethlehem and from the home at Nazareth, the 
clearest possible revelation of the true spirit of the 
Christian religion. It seems as if Jesus Himself 
had become a little child in order to give emphasis 
to His own later teaching concerning the absolute 
necessity of the childlike spirit in those who would 
become members of His kingdom. He came at an 
age in the life of the world which appears in some 
respects childish in comparison with that in which 
we live. But His words and His influence were not 
for that day only, they were for all time. Now, as 
of old, he who would see the kingdom of God, must 
be born again and enter it as a little child. He 
who would do the work of God in the world, must 
do it with the singleness of faith and of purpose 
which are characteristic of childhood. The highest 
attainment which can be made in Christian charac- 
ter on earth, under the training of God's truth and 
His Spirit, is the recovery, as life draws near its 
end, of the purity which marked its beginning. 
And when we enter the kingdom overhead, if we 
ever do enter it, it will be as when a little child is 
born into an earthly home. It will be the entrance 



Leadership of Little Children 225 

upon a life full of wonder and mystery, a life of 
growth, a life of ever-advancing knowledge, a life 
unfolding beneath the Father *s eye, in the safe and 
loving shelter of the Father's house. 



THE NECESSITY OF IMMORTALITY 



This mortal must put on immortality. — i Cor. 
XV. S3- 



XII 
THE NECESSITY OF IMMORTALITY 

It is not altogether easy to follow the apostle's 
argument in this magnificent chapter. We do not 
even commonly feel its force as an argument, so 
powerful is it as a revelation of things which the 
human mind had never before conceived. And 
yet it is an argument, designed to prove that the 
life of man must be continued under new condi- 
tions, in other spheres, beyond the grave. 

Our belief in such a life awaiting us rests on 
various considerations. We find it, for one thing, 
an almost universal belief among mankind ; and we 
justly argue that what men have always and every- 
where accepted as true, cannot be a total illusion. 
We find within ourselves a more or less distinct an- 
ticipation of a life that is to follow death. It is 
contrary, indeed, to all the testimony which comes 
to us through our senses. No clear evidence of it 
may ever have been presented to our minds. It is 
often extremely difficult to make it real to our 
thought, and we feel the force of the arguments 
which tend to disprove it. Yet there are very few 
of us who would be ready to say that they do not 
believe in it. The expectation of it does not seem 
to be due to inheritance and early training, or 
to the influence of the faith of those around us on 
229 



230 Life Indeed 

ourselves. It seems rather to be innate within us, 
to be instinctive in our souls ; and we cannot think 
that there is actually nothing which corresponds to 
it, — that it is a deceptive dream. 

On the contrary, if our deepest and most persist- 
ent feelings will not permit us to accept annihila- 
tion as our destiny, our reason also seems to de- 
mand another life, by which the evident incom- 
pleteness of the present shall be rounded out, its 
mysteries solved, and its contradictions reconciled. 
There would seem to be no order or intelligence in 
the course of earthly affairs ; it would appear rea- 
sonable to question the wisdom and goodness and 
the moral government of God, if processes that are 
here begun are not elsewhere carried forward, and 
if evil which is so often triumphant in this world is 
not in another conquered by good. And then, re- 
ceiving the Bible, as we do, as the word of God, 
intended to reveal to us what we cannot discover 
for ourselves, we find the truth of immortality shin- 
ing, faintly indeed but really, from the pages of the 
Old Testament, and giving a celestial splendor to 
the pages of the New. A future life is not only 
implied in the teaching of the Lord and His apos- 
tles, it is distinctly asserted by them. Some things 
are told us in regard to it which, if we respect their 
authority, we must accept as true. No one who 
believes the Christian Scriptures can doubt that the 
life begun in this world is continued in the world 
unseen. 



The Necessity of Immortality 231 

But in this wonderful chapter of St. Paul's epis- 
tle, which is so often read in that solemn moment 
in which we bid farewell to those whom death has 
taken from us, to which we so often turn for conso- 
lation and for light in the hour of sore bereave- 
ment, and which was so evidently written under an 
inspiration from above, — in this most remarkable 
passage of all his writings, a very different reason 
is given for the belief in a life beyond the grave. 
*'This mortal must put on immortality,'' he says. 
And why '* must " ? Because another life is neces- 
sary to the completion of the work of Christ. The 
relation of every believer to his Saviour, St. Paul 
declares, implies development ; the work of Christ 
within him is not completed when he has given 
himself to Christ and has accepted Christ as his 
Redeemer and Lord. It is then only begun. The 
germ of a new life is implanted in his soul, and 
that life is destined to develop, until finally his 
whole nature shall be renewed and his assimilation 
to Christ be perfect. But this does not take place, 
it cannot take place, within the limits of the pres- 
ent life. It requires another life beyond the grave. 
It involves a change in the conditions and mode of 
existence, by which the fetters of the flesh shall be 
cast off, and a larger career be opened to the eman- 
cipated spirit. With the beginnings of this great 
change we are all familiar. We are conscious of 
them as they take place within ourselves. It is fol- 
lowed by a gradual and steady growth toward the 



232 Life Indeed 

image of Him whose name we bear and whose 
Spirit is at work within us. And now the apostle 
says that this development is not arrested by death. 
It goes forward forever. But its future progress is 
determined by its present tendency. It is like the 
growths of the natural world, — a development 
within the limits of kind. And for its completion 
it requires not merely that the soul should be im- 
mortal, but that the whole man — ^body, soul, and 
spirit — should be translated from this world to an- 
other, where his progress may be unhindered and 
unending. When this is realized, then shall be 
brought to pass the saying that is written, '* Death 
is swallowed up in victory.** The work for the 
sake of which the Son of God became incarnate 
will be fully accomplished. For this reason it is 
that ^^ this corruptible must put on incorruption and 
this mortal must put on immortality ** ; not because 
the life of the human soul is indestructible, or be- 
cause it is fragmentary and imperfect within the 
limits of the present world, but because that which 
Christ has undertaken to do for it cannot be done 
except as its existence is continued into the long 
ages of the future. 

I have no intention of attempting to follow out 
into its details this great argument of the apostle. 
It is certainly worthy, as an argument, to be most 
thoughtfully pondered, and I am persuaded that its 
force is often missed even by those who are most 
familiar with his words and who have derived the 



The Necessity of Immortality 233 

greatest comfort from them. But there are cer- 
tainly one or two thoughts suggested by his course 
of reasoning which might well find a permanent 
place in all our minds. 

The first of them is this : that in order to gain 
any true understanding of our own nature, of the 
purposes and experiences of the present life, and of 
the destiny awaiting us hereafter, it is necessary 
that we should clearly apprehend the nature and 
the office of the Lord Jesus Christ. The tendency 
of Christian thought at the present day is to dwell 
largely on His humanity. Christ as a teacher, as 
an example, as a sympathizing friend, as a patient 
sufferer, as the greatest, wisest, and most lovely of 
mankind, — so it is that we perhaps most often re- 
gard Him. It is most comforting and helpful thus 
to be able to see Jesus as He was seen by those 
who walked at His side and sat at His feet and 
wept in helpless sorrow under the shadow of His 
cross. It has no doubt done much to bring Chris- 
tian theology out of the realm of abstract specula- 
tion, and to make it a living reality. It has made 
us feel afresh the surpassing beauty of a holy life. 
It has taught us priceless lessons of sympathy with 
one another, while it has encouraged us to go to 
Him for forgiveness and for help, with the same 
trustful confidence which He awakened among 
the suffering and the sinful whom He healed and 
pardoned. We cannot possibly get too near to the 
Christ of the gospels. We cannot possibly lay too 



234 Life Indeed 

strong an emphasis on the fact that He took our 
nature upon Him, and that He was in all points 
tempted as we ourselves are tempted now. Never 
again, as long as time lasts, can the world lose 
sight of the man Christ Jesus. 

And yet it is a very striking fact that the great- 
est of the apostles, the chief interpreter and expo- 
nent and champion of the Christian religion, says 
very little about the earthly life and about the hu- 
man nature of our Lord. What he saw in Him 
chiefly was the fulness of the godhead. He was 
to him the Son of God sent down from heaven. 
He came in all the glory of His divine nature and 
dwelt for a little while among us. He came to 
reveal the Father's heart; He came to do the 
Father's will ; He came to recover and restore the 
lost children of His Father, and to reestablish in 
their obedient souls His Father's just authority. 
His life and death were the expression of the self- 
sacrificing love of God. And by giving Himself 
for the redemption of the world, He made Himself 
the King of the world. His presence among men 
was not an incident in their history, it was the ful- 
filment of God's eternal purpose. And His depar- 
ture from the world was not the end of His connec- 
tion with it. It was His exaltation to the throne of 
sovereign authority and power. King of the world, 
Lord of angels and men, — by virtue of His essen- 
tial oneness with His Father and of His atoning 
life and death, — such was Christ as St. Paul con- 



The Necessity of Immortality 235 

ceived of Him, or rather, as He had revealed Him- 
self to His apostle. And that conception of Christ 
was the central fact in St. Paul's philosophy of his- 
tory. It was the key which unlocked for him the 
secrets of the future. When he wrote, '^Of Him 
and through Him and unto Him are all things," 
he showed us plainly in what relation Christ stood 
before his mind to the history of the past, and to the 
still unenacted history of the ages to come. Every- 
thing in heaven and on earth revolved about and 
centred in the Lord Jesus Christ. If apart from 
Him nothing could be accomplished, apart from 
Him nothing could be understood. 

Now it hardly needs to be said that this is a 
much grander and truer way than the other to 
think of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is undoubtedly 
the way in which He thought of Himself. It is 
the way in which He was believed in and wor- 
shiped and trusted by those to whom the founding 
of His church on earth was committed. And it is 
the way in which He has made Himself known to 
the noblest and most truly inspired souls in every 
age. He who has this exalted thought of the 
character, person, and office of the Lord, can alone 
understand what was done on earth in anticipation 
of His coming, and what He has Himself been do- 
ing through the continuing activity of His Spirit 
among men. The history of the past is a hopeless 
tangle except as you see one increasing purpose 
running through it, and recognize that purpose as 



236 Life Indeed 

the redemption of the world from the power of evil 
by the cross and the Spirit of Christ. The tumul- 
tuous movements of mankind at the present hour 
have no more meaning than the tossing of an angry- 
sea, except as you recognize the working out by 
means of them of the same mighty and gracious plan. 
Here is the solution of the mysteries by which we 
are so often baffled in our own personal experience, 
— the disappointments and sorrows which sometimes 
take the joy and hope out of our souls. And here 
is the only possible clue to the unsolved problems 
that confront us, and the only sure basis of hope 
for the future welfare of mankind. Christ over all, 
everywhere active, everywhere working for the 
gracious end which brought Him from the heavens 
to the earth, — this is the one transcendent fact in 
the history of mankind, as it is now going forward 
and is to go forward forever. Small events as well 
as great ones are explained by it. Humble lives 
as well as splendid ones are rich or poor according 
to their relation to it. And he only is competent 
to judge of what has taken place in the past and is 
taking place to-day, or to forecast the yet unreal- 
ized future, who sees that the supreme force by 
which the life of the race has hitherto been guided 
and its future destiny is yet to be determined is the 
sovereign will of Him who was once suspended on 
the cross and to whom now all authority both in 
heaven and on earth is given. 

Another thought suggested by the apostle^s words 



The Necessity of Immortality 237 

is this : that the spiritual Hfe of men is one of con- 
tinuous development, and that that development, 
begun here on earth, is to go on forever. It 
is not very many years since the Christian world 
was startled and alarmed by the proclamation of 
the theory of evolution. Men looked at one an- 
other in dismay, and said, *^If it is true, then the 
authority of the Bible is destroyed, the Christian 
religion must be given up.'* And with the utmost 
vehemence they maintained that it could not be 
true. A calmer temper and a more just discern- 
ment in regard to the matter now prevail among 
us. Scientific thinkers with few exceptions have 
adopted the theory, and Christian thinkers have 
discovered that it not only does not contradict the 
teachings of the Bible, but furnishes new evidence 
of the power, wisdom, and goodness of God. And 
yet while all this hot discussion was going on, we 
had, and were reading every day, in this fifteenth 
chapter of First Corinthians the most impressive 
and the most daring statement of the law of evolu- 
tion which has ever been put into words. ^'That 
which thou sowest is not quickened except it die ; 
and that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that 
body which shall be, but bare grain, it may chance 
of wheat or of some other grain ; but God giveth 
it a body as it hath pleased Him, and to every 
seed his own body." This is the process of de- 
velopment in nature — the evolution of the plant 
and the flower from the seed, within the limit of 



238 Life Indeed 

species, under the operation of the ever-present 
energy of God. The apostle might have gone on 
to point out other appUcations of the same prin- 
ciple, in the development of higher types of life 
from lower ones, in the animal and vegetable world, 
within similar limits and under the same vivifying 
power. He might have applied it to society, and 
then we should have had from him a statement of 
the great principle of social evolution, by which 
the race has been gradually elevated and the civili- 
zation of mankind advanced. He does not do 
this, but he does more than this. He applies it to 
the moral and spiritual life of men. He asserts 
that this is the law under which each of us is liv- 
ing, and by virtue of which each of us is to come 
at last to the fulness of his destiny. Out of the 
germ implanted by God's Spirit in your soul and 
mine a new life springs, which cannot attain its 
full completeness until the bonds by which it is 
now imprisoned have been burst by death and it 
gains the freedom of higher spheres for its un- 
limited and endless progress. As clearly as any- 
thing can be stated, this is what St. Paul maintains 
in this most sublime passage of his writings. It is 
not merely that this world is too small and time too 
short for the activity of such a being as the incarnate 
Son of God. It is that the earth is too small and 
time too short for the full development of the spirit- 
ual nature which every man possesses. If Christ 
needs eternity for the accomplishment of His work, 



The Necessity of Immortality 239 

we too need eternity for the attainment of all that 
we are designed to reach. Like the seed which 
bursts its hard envelope, that the life within it may- 
unfold itself in a new and nobler form, so these 
bodies of ours must be cast off that the life in us 
may come to completer exhibition and to a more 
glorious development. And all this reveals the 
operation of the same divine Spirit from which all 
life proceeds. This is the method of God's work- 
ing in nature, in society, and in the personal ex- 
perience of every one of us. One great divine law 
is over the whole creation. It is this law, the mere 
name of which sometimes alarms us, of the develop- 
ment of the higher from the lower, until the highest 
possibility shall be at last attained. And the death 
of the lower is incidental to this — an essential con- 
dition of it. It is not the end of life, it is the 
opening of the door into a larger, nobler life. The 
apostle Paul was of course a stranger to the scien- 
tific knowledge, as well as to the scientific theories, 
of modern days ; but this great truth he clearly 
saw, and in this wonderful passage he states it with 
equal boldness and power. 

One other thing, which I have already hinted at, 
is plainly taught us in these words. It is that the 
development of the human spirit in the life await- 
ing it hereafter is along the lines which it has been 
pursuing during its career on earth. We often 
think of death as changing everything, not only the 
outward conditions of life but its essential char- 



240 Life Indeed 

acter. We expect it to have a sort of magical 
effect upon us, transforming what was low and base 
into something pure and perfect. It cannot be so, 
if this doctrine of development is true. '^ There 
is a natural body," says St. Paul, ''and there is a 
spiritual body. That was not first which is spirit- 
ual, but that which is natural, and afterward that 
which is spiritual. As we have borne the image of 
the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the 
heavenly. The dead shall be raised, incorruptible, 
and we shall be changed." Yes, but we shall still 
be ourselves. It is this corruptible which must put 
on incorruption, and this mortal which must put on 
immortality. '' To every seed its own body." 
The life of the world to come is the same life that 
is in us now, expanded, exalted, made immortal. 
The character which we are to manifest forever is 
that which is formed within us and revealed by us 
here on earth. If it were not so, then this present 
life would stand in no relation to the life beyond 
the grave. If it were not so, there would have 
been no reason why the Lord Jesus Christ should 
come to this world and should suffer and die here. 
The cross might as well have been set up on the 
other side of the river of death. If it were not so, 
there would be no reason why the gospel should be 
preached to living men. It might just as well be 
preached to disembodied spirits, if it is not the life 
we are now living which determines the condition 
and the character of the life which is to come. It 



The Necessity of Immortality 241 

is a tremendous fact, but it is a fact, that we are in 
eternity already. We are already started on that 
career which is to have no end. As our faces are 
now set, so we are forever to travel, — upward or 
downward, toward God or away from Him, toward 
ever loftier heights of purity and happiness, or ever 
deeper depths of sin and shame. This mortal 
must put on immortality ; and such as this mortal 
now is, such will its immortality be. There is no 
promise of any moral reformation in death. For 
death only touches the body. It cannot change 
the immortal spirit. Not when we have passed out 
of earthly conditions, but here and now, is the 
question of our eternal destiny decided. 

It sometimes seems as if the fact that this mortal 
must put on immortality, sooner or later, and per- 
haps very soon, made our present life a thing of 
little consequence. Why should we care very 
much what we do or do not do, what we gain or 
lose, what we enjoy or suffer, when at any moment 
we are liable to pass out of this brief existence into 
that which will never end ? Yes, it is true that this 
earthly life is of little consequence compared with 
the life everlasting. If you are straining every 
nerve to make money, to obtain power over your 
fellow-men, to secure new opportunities of enjoy- 
ment, to gain a social position which you can keep 
only for a few years at the utmost, it is not worth 
while, in view of the fact that your true life is not 
on this side of the grave but on the other. It is 



242 Life Indeed 

not worth while to suffer yourself to be tormented 
by envy of those who are more fortunate than you 
are ; or to be filled with anger and hatred toward 
those who have treated you ill ; or to be discour- 
aged by difficulties, or restive under restraints, or 
morose or petulant under disappointment, or heart- 
broken under great affliction. Remember that this 
mortal must soon put on immortality, and that then 
all these things will be forever left behind. What 
do you care now for the trials which seemed so in- 
tolerable when you were a child ? When you be- 
come an immortal, you will think and care still less 
about a thousand things which now engross your 
mind and oppress your spirit. In this sense the 
present life is of small account compared with that 
which is to come. 

But on the other hand, it is of inconceivable 
consequence in view of its relation to the future life, 
when you remember that what you are now doing 
determines your character, and that your character 
determines your destiny. Even trifling acts thus 
acquire immense significance. It is because we so 
constantly forget that we are laying the foundations 
on which we are to build forever ; that we are sow- 
ing the seeds of a harvest which we are to reap in 
the centuries to come, — it is because we forget this 
that we suffer ourselves to be so absorbed with 
things that do not profit, and so indifferent to the 
claims of duty and of God. O that we might re- 
member, as our life goes on from day to day, as we 



The Necessity of Immortality 243 

move about among our fellow-men, as we go to our 
business and return to our homes, as one by one we 
meet the temptations and the opportunities which 
come crowding upon us hour by hour, — O that we 
might say to ourselves from time to time : ** I too 
must put on immortality. This is not life ; it is 
only the preparation for life. I am a child at 
school. The career assigned me, the work I am to 
do, lies all before me. How soon I must take it up 
I do not know. But I do know that I am soon to 
put on immortality. I am to stand with those who 
have passed over their earthly course before me and 
have now entered into life. I am to see God. I 
am to appear in the presence of Christ. I am to 
be admitted to the society of the pure and blessed 
spirits who are already living the immortal life. 
How may I fit myself to join them ? How may I 
become worthy to share in the service in which they 
are engaged? God help me to do this day's work 
aright ! God shield me from the temptations to evil 
by which I shall otherwise be surely overcome, so 
that when the hour strikes for my entrance upon the 
life awaiting me, I may be ready for the summons, 
and be prepared to leave what is mortal behind me, 
and to go forth to an immortality of peace and 
joy ! '• 

Then, if the truth which is brought before us in 
these words of the apostle is fitted to impress us 
with the sense of the solemnity and sacredness of 
life, it also enables us to understand the reason 



244 Life Indeed 

why the Lord Jesus Christ should come into this 
world and here lay down His life for its redemption. 
The gospel sometimes seems to us so mysterious 
and wonderful as to be beyond belief. It is, in- 
deed, quite impossible that men should have 
invented such a story and have wrought out for 
themselves upon the basis of it a religion of such 
scope and grandeur and spiritual power. And yet 
we sometimes say to ourselves, <* Do I really believe, 
can I really believe, that Jesus of Nazareth was in 
truth the Son of God ; that God Himself was will- 
ing to take my nature on Him, and to suffer and 
die for my salvation ? '* We could not believe it if 
this life were all. It would be incredible if the 
only result to be accomplished by it were the 
deliverance of men from the evils by which they 
are now afflicted, or even the establishment of a 
purer and happier social life among them while the 
earth continues to be their home. But when you 
remember that each and every one of them is an 
immortal being with an endless existence before 
him, with possibilities of an unlimited development 
into the likeness of the Son of God, then it is easy 
to understand how the heart of God should have 
longed to rescue and save them, and how Christ 
should have been willing to leave His place amidst 
the heavenly glory and submit to the agony and 
shame of Calvary. If the grandeur of Christ^s 
nature and office was the ground of the apostle's 
firm assurance concerning the life beyond the 



The Necessity of Immortality 245 

grave, on the other hand the fact of the Ufe beyond 
the grave makes it possible for us to receive, with 
beUeving and adoring hearts, the revelation of 
divine love and mercy which is made to us in His 
cross. 

There is surely no little comfort and encourage- 
ment in this great truth for those who are conscious 
of the weakness and imperfectness of the character 
which they at present show. How many of us are 
there who are not often burdened by the fact that 
we come so far short of the standard at which we 
are aiming, and that our progress toward it is so 
fitful and so slow? *^ Is it worth while,'* we some- 
times ask ourselves, *'to struggle on, when we have 
thus far made so little progress and when the goal 
of onr hearts' desires is still so distant?'' Ah! 
but let us remember that we have yet to put on 
immortality. The work which Christ has under- 
taken to do for us, is not to be accomplished here. 
For its fulfilment we must wait till He shall sum- 
mon us to the spheres of life into which He Him- 
self has passed. There, by and by, we shall 
receive the answer to our prayers, we shall attain 
the fulfilment of our hopes. As we have borne the 
image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image 
of the heavenly. Not only all sin, but all im- 
perfection, will be left behind. We shall see Him, 
W3 shall be like Him, and we shall be satisfied. 

And here is the motive for unwearied, self-deny- 
ing, lifelong labor for the salvation of our fellow- 



246 Life Indeed 

men, — the motive of all missionary work, the 
motive of all humane and Christian activity. Not 
merely is it a blessed thing to relieve the present 
misery of those who are in need ; to teach them 
and help them to make life purer, brighter, and 
richer in enjoyment; not merely does he deserve 
well of mankind, who does anything to promote 
the progress of the world in knowledge, happiness, 
and virtue. The great motive which appeals to us 
as Christians, as disciples of the one divine Master, 
as those who hold the faith which was so splendidly 
maintained by the apostle Paul, — the great motive 
of Christian fidelity and zeal is in the fact that our 
fellow-men, as well as we, are immortal beings, for 
whom the life of this world is to be followed by an 
endless life in worlds beyond. It is well to have a 
care for men's bodies, but the soul is of infinitely 
greater value than the body. And the greatest 
need of men to-day, in our own land and in 
heathen lands, is such a knowledge of God as will 
renew their souls and awaken in them a trije 
spiritual life. It is on moral and religious truth 
that all civilization rests, and we are trying to erect 
a building without a foundation, when we under- 
take to civilize or elevate our fellow-men without 
imparting to them the truth, as it has come to us by 
the lips and life of Jesus Christ. Let us not forget this 
in our work among the needy and ignorant at oir 
own doors. Let us not forget it when the call 
comes to help in sending the gospel to the other 



The Necessity of Immortality 2-i7 

side of the globe. We are dealing with immortal 
beings who, even while we are speaking of them 
and praying for them, are swiftly passing to the 
judgment-seat of God. We cannot be too prompt, 
we cannot be too earnest, in our efforts to carry or 
to send to them the message of God's grace in Jesus 
Christ. In that lies the secret of life in the best 
and highest sense, — a noble, useful, happy life on 
earth, and a life of glory, honor, and immortality 
beyond the grave. 



THE PLACE AND THE WAY 



And whither I go ye know, and the way ye 
know. Thomas saith unto Jfim, Lord, we know 
not whither Thou goest, and how can we know the 
way ? Jesus saith unto him, I am the way . . . 
no man cometh unto the Father but by Me. — John 
xiv. 4-6. 



XIII 

THE PLACE AND THE WAY 

We are naturally jealous of many of the changes 
which have been made in the Revised Version of the 
New Testament, especially in those passages which, 
like this chapter and the following chapters of St. 
John's gospel, are peculiarly familiar and dear to 
all Christian hearts. It seems almost a sacrilege to 
touch a letter, to disturb the rhythmic cadence of 
a phrase, even in our English translation of them, 
which has come to have a sacredness of its own, 
in addition to that which belongs to the original 
words, from the tender and hallowed associations 
with which it is invested through the reverent use 
of centuries. 

And yet even in these most precious portions of 
God's word, a change in the rendering cannot but 
be accepted and welcomed when it brings out more 
clearly an important thought which the former 
version had obscured, or represents a truer reading 
of the original text, where it has in some way be- 
come corrupted. Thus in beginning His last dis- 
course to His disciples, it is almost certain that our 
Lord did not say, '^Ye believe in God; believe 
also in Me," as if their confidence in Him were to 
be added to or derived from that reverence for 
251 



252 Life Indeed 

Jehovah which was felt by every Jew. It was the 
want of a true belief in God, as their Father and 
His own, that had caused the sorrow with which 
their hearts were filled. And therefore His com- 
mand is, ^' Believe in God, and believe in Me, as 
the manifestation of God, and let not your hearts 
be troubled. '* 

In the words which almost immediately follow 
these, the error lies not in the translation but in 
two words which have crept into the text and 
which in the judgment of the best modern authori- 
ties should be removed from it. Their removal 
gives a new force and beauty to the passage, and 
as it now stands, it suggests an important and 
practical train of thought. As it appears in our 
Bibles it shows us one of the disciples flatly contra- 
dicting the Lord. Jesus says, ^'Whither I go ye 
know,'* and Thomas answers, ''We know not 
whither Thou goest.** He had supposed that the 
Messiah, when He came, was to abide forever on 
the earth, to restore the kingdom to Israel, to re- 
establish the throne of David at Jerusalem, and to 
extend His sway over all the nations. But Christ 
had told them that He must go away, and that 
they could not follow Him at once. He had 
spoken to them of a home, which He had called 
His Father's house, in which were many dwell- 
ing-places, where He would prepare a place for 
them and into which by and by He would receive 
them. And He adds, ''Whither I go ye know 



The Place and the Way 253 

the way." He does not say '' Ye know whither I 
am going/' for that, as Thomas testifies, they did 
not know. But the way was plain to them, though 
the point to which it led was still beyond their 
sight. Then it is that the slow and cautious mind 
of the disciple, lingering bewildered over the 
picture of a royal palace far away, so different 
from that which his fancy had painted as the 
future home of the Messiah, replies, <*But Lord, 
we do not even know whither Thou art going ; how 
then do we know the way ? First tell us plainly 
where Thy future abode shall be, and then per- 
chance we may discover the path which will lead 
us also to it." There is at once instruction and 
reproof in our Lord's reply, *'0 thou honest but 
narrow soul, hast thou not learned that I am the 
way? I came forth from the Father, and I am 
going again to the Father. That is all ye need to 
know, and ye would have known it, if ye had 
known Me for what I am. To be with the Father 
is heaven for Me, for you, for every human soul, 
and no man cometh unto the Father but by Me. 
The fulness of meaning that My words contain, it 
is not in human power to conceive. No mortal 
eye hath seen or can see the glories that are re- 
served for the children of God. Not upon any 
earthly hills, shadowed by clouds and swept by 
storms, do the walls and towers of the New Jerusa- 
lem stand in their divine strength and beauty. 
And not even in thought can ye follow Me now to 



254 Life Indeed 

that realm of joy and peace which is so soon to 
open its gates of pearl to My ascending spirit. It 
is enough for you to know that it is My Father's 
house. He is its light and life and glory, and 
wherever He is, there is heaven. To Him even 
now ye may draw near through Me, and through 
Me alone. Cease then from your idle and vain 
inquiry, ^Whither goest thou?' and let not your 
hearts be troubled, because though ye know not 
whither I am going, ye know that I am the way.*' 

The question of Thomas is one which it is nat- 
ural for us all to ask. Our lips shape themselves 
more easily to the word <*V/hither?" than to the 
word ^* How? " We too are apt to ask it, as he 
did, concerning what we call the future world, the 
world beyond the grave. We carry the idea of 
space, which is so inwrought into all our thinking, 
and the material conditions with which we are now 
so familiar, into our reveries and our speculations 
concerning the life of the soul hereafter. We are 
accustomed to think of heaven as a place far above 
us and far before us, and our curious minds vex 
themselves with the endeavor to bring it near and 
make it real to our thought. We strive to form 
some definite image of the spiritual body, which is 
appropriate to it, and of the activities and enjoy- 
ments which belong to that higher realm of being. 
We try to follow the vanished forms of those who 
have gone from us into the eternal silence, and to 
imagine the scenes amid which they are now mov- 



The Place and the Way 255 

ing. How often, as we have stood by the bedside 
of one who was dying, while the winter storm was 
beating against the windows of the hushed and 
darkened room, have we thought with a shudder 
of the long and lonely journey that lay before the 
gentle soul, which was, as we are wont to say, 
about to take its flight. Somewhere in the vague 
realms of air above us, beyond the clouds, beyond 
the stars, but O, how far from our aching hearts, 
is the city that hath imperishable foundations, the 
ever-blooming Paradise of God. There, we are 
sure, they are at rest, whose earthly toil and strife 
are over ; their feet have touched the golden 
threshold, their eyes have seen the King in His 
beauty, their voices are chiming in the seraphic 
song. But O, if the mists that surround us could 
be parted for an instant, so that we might once 
more behold them and know whither they have 
gone ! And so when we think of that last hour, 
which is so certainly and so swiftly drawing near to 
each of us, when we too must leave the places and 
the friends that we have known so well, and go 
forth into the silent land, how eagerly we long for 
some more precise knowledge of that which we are 
there to find ! Shall we pass at once to the house 
not made with hands, when this frail earthly tent is 
broken up ? Or shall the departing spirit wander 
off, like some lonely bird, higher and higher through 
the cold and empty spaces of the universe, till at 
last it sees in the distance above it the far-shining 



256 Life Indeed 

splendors of its celestial mansion, and folds its 
weary wings in the safe shelter of the immortal 
home ! The fear of death by which many Chris^ 
tian hearts are haunted, is not the fear that they 
shall fall under the displeasure of God and be 
banished from His presence ; they are confident of 
His forgiving mercy and love. It is the natural 
dread of the mystery which involves the beginning 
of the future life ; the dread of the passage from 
one world to the other ; the timidity which springs 
from the belief that there is a vast interval between 
them, and that the soul at death must traverse this, 
not knowing whither it is going. 

But all such fears arise, it seems to me, from a 
false conception of the spiritual world. We forget 
that ^^ flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom 
of God ' ' and that the familiar imagery which we 
use in describing it, which pictures it to us as a 
new earth, and not something wholly different from 
the earth, is only misleading if it is literally under- 
stood. There can hardly be an error more com- 
plete than when men fix upon some distant star and 
say, *' There is heaven,'' or imagine that in the 
ages of the future this rocky ball on which we now 
are living is to be purified by fire and made the 
eternal home of the spirits of the blessed. If the 
spiritual world is composed of material elements, 
like the visible universe which now surrounds us, 
then there is a sharply defined boundary between 
them, and the one ends at least where the other 



The Place and the Way 257 

begins. Two material bodies or systems of bodies 
certainly cannot occupy the same space, and heaven 
cannot encroach upon earth. Then we must pass 
beyond the orbits of Saturn and of Sirius, beyond 
the faintest fleck of Hght that shines in the misty 
nebula of Orion, before we can reach the sapphire 
walls and enter through the pearly gates to the 
glory that no mortal eye hath seen. Then there is 
before our souls an inconceivably long and desolate 
journey, and the spirits of those whom we have 
lost are removed to an immeasurable distance from 
us. 

But did it never occur to you, when you have 
had such views of heaven, when you have shrunk 
back in dismay from the shore of that dim and un- 
known sea on which you also must by and by 
launch out into the darkness, — did it never occur 
to you that if these thoughts are true, you have 
shut out God from the universe in which His chil- 
dren are now dwelling ? ^* Heaven is,** said Jesus, 
^'My Father's house; I am going to the Father." 
Its glory and its joy are in the manifested presence 
of God, in the unclouded vision of His face, in 
perfect and immortal sympathy with Him. It is 
not a region of sensuous delights, a garden whose 
flowers never fade, a temple whose worship never 
ceases. The sea of glass that is mingled with fire, 
the song of the hundred and forty-four thousand, 
the tree of life w^hose leaves are for the healing of 
the nations — it is all a magnificent, inspired sym- 



258 Life Indeed 

holism, to lift our thought to a higher state of be- 
ing, in which the glorified human spirit shall come 
into a new and near relation to the Divine Spirit. 
But that, and that alone, is heaven. To be with 
God, in constant, vivid, joyful fellowship, to lose 
our separate wills in His will, to be so mastered 
and possessed by Him that our life shall be con- 
sciously a part of His life, that He shall be in us 
and we in Him, so that whether we are in the 
body or out of the body we shall neither know nor 
care, because God shall be to us all in all, — that is, 
if we may trust the Scriptures, the essence of the 
heavenly felicity. It is for the human soul to enter 
into immediate and immortal communion with the 
Divine Spirit. It is to ^^ go to the Father.'* 

But now with this, time and space and the laws 
of matter have nothing to do. It may be realized, 
partially at least, wherever God and the soul are 
found, wherever God manifests Himself to the 
human soul. Heaven is not a locality, to be 
sought somewhere beyond the boundaries of the 
sensible universe ; it is a character, an experience, 
a life. And it may as well be here as anywhere, — 
among us and around us as well as millions of 
miles away. It is not a foreign country ; it is a 
new condition. Among the material objects of 
which the universe is made up, whose constitutions 
we can analyze and whose movements we can 
trace, we find an invisible, impalpable, spiritual 
being, with capacities that are not limited by its 



The Place and the Way 259 

sensible environment, and powers whose action is 
not governed by physical laws. It is the immortal 
soul of man. And over it there is another spirit, 
of whose existence it alone has knowledge, to which 
it feels itself akin, a spirit of infinite power and 
purity, of light and truth, of life and grace. It 
cannot be discerned by the organs of sense ; the 
eye does not behold its glory, the human ear does 
not hear its voice. The soul alone can apprehend 
it ; but to the soul it is real and near. And now it 
is when these two spiritual beings, God and the 
soul, come together, in harmony and love, that the 
heavenly experience begins. The soul is then like 
a wandering star that has found its true orbit, like 
a wayward child that has returned to its home. It 
forgets, for the time, the physical conditions in 
which it is imprisoned, as the artist in communion 
even with the ideal images which are only the 
creatures of his fancy, may forget his hunger and 
poverty and pain. It has escaped from the lower 
and material world into the higher, spiritual sphere 
which is the realm in which it is fitted to dwell. 
The claims of the body, the exigencies of the 
temporal, material, visible, soon bring it back 
within the earthly limitations, but in such an hour 
it has had a foretaste of the heavenly experience. 
For a little time, at least, it has been *^ with the 
Father.'^ 

Now the higher and purer the character becomes, 
the more frequent and the more perfect becomes 



260 Life Indeed 

this experience. The soul may gain — as some 
human souls have gained it — a constant sense of 
God's presence and love, an abiding peace, a con- 
tinual communion. It must always still be incom- 
plete, so long as the earthly prison-house detains 
us, so long as the earthly temptations hedge us 
round. Yet even here it is possible for us to live a 
life which is truly described as a life **in God.** 
And the joy and peace and victory of such a life is 
more than the pledge, it is the literal beginning of 
heaven. And this, it seems to me, is what the 
Saviour meant when He said, ^* I am in the Father 
and the Father in Me.** He was still in the world, 
when He uttered these words, compassed by its 
infirmities, burdened by its sorrows, in contact 
with its sin ; but already, in the perfect accord of 
His own will with the will of God, in the free 
and uninterrupted communion of His spirit with 
the spirit of God, He was ever in ^^His Father's 
house.** What then was death to Him? It was 
not the beginning of a long journey, in which His 
soul was to be borne beyond the rim of the material 
universe. It was merely the falling away of every- 
thing that had hindered and hampered His inter- 
course with God. *' I am going away,'* He said, 
** because My body, through which alone I am 
visible to you, will soon pass from among you. 
But I am with the Father already, and then I shall 
only be more perfectly and forever with Him. 
Nothing will be changed to Me, except that My 



The Place and the Way 261 

soul will have shaken off the fetters of the flesh. 
Nothing will be changed to you, except that for a 
little while ye shall not see Me with your eyes or 
touch Me with your hands. But I am with you 
always, in a spiritual fellowship, and I shall by and 
by receive you to Myself, when the death of the 
body shall at last set free your souls.*' 

And that, and nothing more, my Christian 
friends, is what death means to you and me. The 
spiritual world is not far from us, it is all around 
us. It is not separated by a deep abyss from the 
world of material objects and of physical energies ; 
it pervades and permeates this, as the sunlight fills 
the air. We are in it now ; it is the realm in which 
our souls are living. It is in it that we are brought 
into contact and communion with God, and become 
aware of His presence, as He manifests Himself 
not to the outward eye but to the spiritual sense. 
But meanwhile we are also living another life under 
physical conditions, in common with the beasts that 
perish. From this, death sets us free, and then the 
life of the soul goes on forever. The transition 
from a sphere in which sense and spirit are blended, 
to one which is spiritual only, — from one in which 
our perception of God is dim and partial to one in 
which it is complete, — that is what it is to die. If 
our souls are now in friendship and harmony with 
God, so that to come into perfect communion with 
Him is the consummation of our highest human 
experience, it will be to us to pass from earth to 



262 Life Indeed 

heaven. If our souls are now at enmity with Him, 
so that they will shrink from Him in terror when 
they are no longer sheltered from Him by the 
barriers which now enclose them, it will be to pass 
from earth to hell. If there are no real walls of 
sapphire above the firmament, there is also no literal 
lake of fire. But to go thus to the Father, is heaven 
for one soul, and to meet God, face to face, spirit 
to spirit, is hell for another. 

I have dwelt thus at length on this part of our 
Lord's teaching, because it seems to bring His doc- 
trine of the future life into striking accord with our 
best thought concerning the nature of the soul. We 
cannot spare His figurative description of the con- 
dition of the glorified spirit hereafter. The man- 
sions of the Father's house, the city of God, whose 
length and breadth and height are equal, the streets 
of gold, the gates that are never shut, the praising 
company whose robes are washed white in the blood 
of the Lamb, — no physical imagery is too striking or 
beautiful to set forth the transcendent spiritual fact. 
But if we ask for a clearer and more exact state- 
ment of the truth that is behind the symbol, we have 
it here. '^ I am now in the Father. My spiritual 
nature is even now in constant communion with 
Him. Yet I am going to the Father, for that which 
here on earth makes this communion imperfect is to 
pass away, and My soul will then live its own life, 
unhampered by the flesh. Heaven is not a place 
to which My emancipated spirit shall ascend ; it is 



The Place and the Way 263 

the condition in which My spirit will be found, 
when it is emancipated from the body ; it is the 
purest and best of all earthly experiences consum- 
mated and made immortal ; it is to be consciously 
and uninterruptedly and forever with God.'* 

But if this is so, then two or three things are 
made very plain. The first is that the Christian 
soul, which already knows what it is to hold such 
communion with God, need have no more fear of 
death than it has of prayer. Not that it is in prayer 
only that we realize God's presence and come into 
sympathy with Him, but it is in prayer usually that 
He draws nearest us, and that our sense of His be- 
ing and His love is most vivid and most joyful. It 
is especially in prayer that the soul seems to break 
away from all its earthly limitations, and stand in 
awe, perhaps in rapture, before the very face of the 
Most High. And that is why prayer is the loftiest 
experience which is possible for the human soul. 
But it is an experience which death only intensifies 
and perpetuates. That which is on earth occasional 
and partial, becomes constant and complete, and 
we call it heaven. It is the celestial felicity ; it is 
the beatific vision. And if you are not afraid to 
lose yourself, as we say, that is to lose the con- 
sciousness of your physical surroundings, in such an 
overwhelming sense of God's presence, you need 
not be afraid to die. If such moments have been 
to you the moments of deepest and purest happi- 
ness, if it is then that you have seemed to live the 



264 Life Indeed 

largest and truest life, let not your heart be troubled, 
for you have already stood on the threshold of your 
heavenly mansion, and for you to die will only be 
to enter in. 

So too, if this is what is meant by heaven, the 
supreme importance of character is plain. The 
chief end of life is not to gain admittance, when we 
die, to an abode of endless happiness, to pass a cer- 
tain line and feel ourselves secure. It is to acquire 
such a character that we shall rejoice to go to the 
Father, that we shall be in sympathy with Him, 
and find in fellowship with Him our heaven. Men 
sometimes say, ^*The descriptions of heaven which 
are given in the Scriptures do not attract me. The 
popular Christian conception of it, as a place where 
happy saints are forever singing hymns of praise, has 
no charm, no reality for me.*' Ah, but think a 
moment, and you will see that that is not it. The 
time will come when your body will perish and all 
your earthly interests will vanish away. And the 
great question for you is. What is the character of 
that spiritual nature within you which does not die 
— your thoughts, your affections, your will — in a 
single word, your soul ? You live a double life at 
present, partly physical, partly spiritual ; take the 
physical away — death will soon do it for you — and 
what have you left? Is your heart in S5niipathy 
with God, or at enmity with Him ? Or is He not 
in all your thoughts ? Remember that nothing but 
what you are can go over with you from the phys- 



The Place and the Way 265 

ical to the spiritual realm of being, not because 
you must leave it all behind you and wander off to 
some remote planet, but because you are already 
living a life with which all this has nothing to do. 
Your houses and lands, your books and friends, are 
not a part of you; you move among them, the 
body is the bond which unites you to them. But 
you are a spirit, and the spiritual world is that to 
which you rightfully belong. Now then, not with 
what earthly associates, but with what spiritual be- 
ings are you in sympathy ? What friends will re- 
ceive you, and find you fitted for their society, 
when you are lost sight of by your earthly friends ? 
Will you meet the great Spirit, into whose presence 
you pass, as one whom you have already known 
and loved, or one whom you have disregarded or 
defied ? If you are dissatisfied with what you call 
the childish pictures which the Bible paints of the 
Judgment Day and that which follows it, take the 
subject up out of the region of metaphor into the 
most abstract realm of thought that you can reach ; 
let us use words with the utmost precision, and tell 
me, when your spiritual nature is brought by death 
into immediate contact with the infinite Spirit, will 
it be as when a child rushes to the embrace of a 
father, or as when a criminal stands trembling be- 
fore his judge? That, I think, is what, in its 
simplest terms, it is to be saved or to be lost. 

And finally, how clear, in the light of what has 
now been said, is the meaning of the Saviour's 



266 Life Indeed 

words, '* I am the way/' He is the way to heaven 
because He is the way to God ; no man cometh 
unto the Father but by Him, and to come to the 
Father is to go whither He has gone. In language 
that is simpler still, it is by Christ that we are 
brought into harmony with God, — ^by His life, by 
His teachings, by His death, by His indwelling 
presence in our souls. It is in Him that God has 
come near to us, making His voice audible to our 
ears, making His glory visible before our eyes. He 
that hath seen Him hath seen the Father, full of 
grace and full of truth. Out of that spiritual realm 
in which He is always near us He has come forth 
into the material world, and under mortal condi- 
tions has manifested Himself to the actual percep- 
tion of the senses. It was in order that we might 
be without excuse, if we do not know and trust and 
love Him. In the historic, human Jesus, He has 
shown Himself to the incarnate human soul ; and 
He has shown us also how such a soul may live in 
fellowship with the spiritual world. He removed 
in His atoning death, the great barrier of unfor- 
given sin which hindered the free approach of the 
soul of man to God. And now in this twofold 
sense He says, ^^ I am the way ! Make My sacrifice 
your own, and God will receive you. Live as I 
have lived, follow Me, and you may have a con- 
scious, continuing fellowship with Him. Believe Me 
that I am in the Father, and come to the Father 
through Me. So shall you gain that knowledge of 



The Place and the Way 267 

God which is life eternal, that spiritual communion 
with Him which is the foretaste of heaven. And 
by and by I will come again, and receive you into 
that richer experience, that clearer vision, which 
is its consummation." 

We have learned that in the kingdom of nature 
there are no sudden leaps or breaks, but only steady 
and continuous development. It will be well for 
us when we learn that the same thing is true of the 
kingdom of God. No man will be suddenly thrust 
into heaven through the open door of death. We 
must enter heaven here on earth, if we are to enter 
it at all. 



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